


The Juncture of Sea and Sky

by FyrMaiden



Category: Glee
Genre: Boxing & Fisticuffs, Canon Compliant Injury (Blaine's eye), Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Homophobia, M/M, Minor Santana Lopez/Brittany S. Pierce, Original Character Death(s), Past Blaine Anderson/Sebastian Smythe, Pirates, Poisoning, Racism, implied sexual violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-07-12 06:02:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 26,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7088173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt and Brittany are recently married and headed for their new home in Jamaica when their ship is boarded by pirate captain Santana Lopez and her very cute first mate, Blaine Anderson. Will Kurt and Blaine find love on the high seas, or will tradition and responsibility force them apart? (Written for the Klaine Summer Challenge 2016)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Klaine Summer Challenge 2016. Each part is a prompt fill, and some may prove hella tenuous.
> 
> Notes for this part: Kurt and Brittany are bound for a plantation in Jamaica. They do not make it, and the ethics of the plantation are not discussed. But it is the reason for their journey.

Kurt Hummel leans against the side of the ship and tries - unsuccessfully - to focus on not throwing up. He feels as green as the sapphire in his mother’s necklace, and he knows it has been the subject of much enjoyment for the crew of the ‘Rachel’. 

It has been three weeks since he and his new wife had left England for the Americas and, eventually, the British West Indies. When they married - arranged by Kurt’s father and Brittany’s mother, both of them in desperate need of what the other could offer - they had been told that they would be headed for Jamaica, where they are to run Newside Park, a 600 acre sugar plantation that had been part of his bride’s dowery. Kurt had hoped that he would learn to weather the crossing better with time, but each swell of the waves crashes through him, his entire body lurching with the ship. If there were anything in his stomach, he knows without any shadow of a doubt that he would be losing it to the ocean, much to his own distress and chagrin. He groans and rests his head in his hands, and offers a prayer to anyone listening to one lone voice in the vast for him to reach solid land unscathed and unharmed.

He is still offering that prayer when his wife, Brittany (of the Oxford Pierces, once rich in cotton and land but now short a little now on both) appears beside him. Her blonde hair is pinned neatly into a bun at the base of her skull, and her pretty, almond shaped eyes dance when she looks at him. Her mouth is quick to smile, and that makes Kurt smile as well, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly. She turns and rests against the rail, her skirts puffing out around her. She fixes her eyes on the figurehead mounted at the front - “Fore, Kurt,” she says fondly - of the boat.

“Did you know,” she says brightly, “That the figurehead is the image of the woman the ship is named after?” 

He shakes his head, and turns to lean against the railing himself. The sun above them is hot and bright, the sky bright blue between the clouds. The breeze is strong, and the sails billow beautifully. Kurt may not be a natural sailor, but he appreciates the aesthetics of the ‘Rachel’.

“No,” he says, “I didn’t know that. That’s interesting.”

Brittany looks at him, and then back at the figurehead. “Noah says that Finn is called Finn because he once wrestled a shark,” she says, and Kurt can’t suppress the snort of laughter. He takes her arm in his and they head down from the gun deck to the main deck, the periwinkle blue flowers in her dress highlighting the colour of his coat.

“Is that right?” he asks, and she squeezes his arm.

“Probably not,” she replies, with an insight that most people don’t expect of her, seemingly innocent and scatterbrained as she can be. “I think Noah is trying to see how many untruths he can stretch my incredulity to. But I’m not sure I should spoil his fun, or the legend the Rachel is trying to attain. I think Captain Hudson thinks himself a scoundrel, and I see no reason to disavow him of that belief.”

There are times, Kurt thinks to himself, staring at her milk white arm linked with his, that he almost wishes he loved her in the way that she deserves.

*

They’re a week out from Jamaica, the ‘Rachel’ making good time down the coast, trading in port towns, picking up new cargo and provisions, when they hear rumours that the mutineered ‘Portuguese Princess’ has been spotted to the south, where its new captain - a  _ woman _ , at that, they’ve heard her name and know the stories - has been leading the raid and plunder of any ship it comes across.

Finn tells Kurt not to worry, that the ‘Rachel’ is fast and doesn’t look worth the effort. Kurt tries not to think about how much he wasn’t concerned before Finn had said anything, but it still sits and festers in the back of his mind. The ‘Rachel’ has been taking on expensive cargo, and most of it could be resold easily for a profit. If there’s anything Kurt does know about, it’s the cost of silk. 

Kurt is not the first to see the billowing sails of the ‘Princess’ in the distance, but he is amongst the few people on the deck when the shout goes up. He doesn’t understand the individual words that the men around him shout, but he does understand the feeling of panic. He understands when the cannon are loaded. He understands when Finn yells at him to get below and to keep his woman with him. 

He understands the flag that he sees raised as the ship comes closer, and he understands that Finn does not mean to surrender the ‘Rachel’ without a fight.

He’s not afraid to admit that the notion terrifies him a little. A lot. He takes Brittany to the cargo hold, and whispers for her to be quiet. She doesn’t have to be told twice, links their hands together and whispers a prayer of her own. 

The hours feels long in the hold, surrounded by silks and silence, but it doesn’t take long for the ‘Rachel’ to surrender. In reality, she is no match for the ‘Princess’. She’s overtaken fast, the crew disarmed and imprisoned. Kurt and Brittany are discovered in the hold and brought up on deck, where a woman with long dark hair paces the deck, twirling a cutlass in her hand as her feet tattoo a pattern on the weathered boards. She stops when she sees Brittany, a lascivious smile on her face that makes Kurt grip his wife’s hand hard, making her wince and twist her hand in his. 

“Well,” the pirate captain - for she can be no-one else, Kurt thinks; this is the Santana Lopez who overthrew the ‘Princess’ and whose crew have been fiercely loyal to her in the years since - says. “What do we have here?” 

“We’re bound for the West Indies,” Brittany says, and Kurt closes his eyes. He doesn’t feel sick from the waves anymore. There is a new nausea rising inside of him, panicked and rushing white through his skull.

Kurt blacks out in a pile of limbs and silk.

Which means he misses the arrival of Santana’s first mate from the cabins he had been using. He misses the way his shoulders look in bright blue satin, and the way his smile lights up his face, and the way he looks concerned when Santana pokes Kurt with the tip of her sword and rolls her eyes.

“You wanted him,” she says. “So you’re going to have to find a way to get him off of this tub.” 

When Kurt does come round, it’s to find two tea coloured eyes inches from his face. They pull back when Kurt’s eyes blink open, and they’re replaced with an orange, which Kurt accepts and stares at with some confusion. He looks back at the boy with the eyes once more, and the concern in them makes his heart flutter in that exact way that got him banished to the colonies to begin with.

This, he understands, could be the beginnings of a problem.  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Challenge Prompt: 'Ice Cream Parlous'. I fear my fills for these prompts are only going to get more tenuous.
> 
> General research notes: None, but research remains a flimsy concept. Ice cream existed, but probably not for the masses. And 'what did pirates *do*'? Steal shit, really. So there it is. Research!

Santana Lopez bangs her tankard down on the table and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She leans back in her chair and crosses her ankles, stares up at the ceiling for a long minute, and then looks at Blaine where he leans against the door. 

“The men are bored,” he says, “We’ve been a long time at sea. They’d like a proper bed, and a woman with -” He gestures towards her, waves vaguely at the cleavage visible between her undone buttons “- flesh they can touch.” 

Santana grins, mischievous and dirty, and rearranges her shirt to expose more of her ample chest. As if on cue, Blaine blushes and averts his eyes. Every time, he thinks. He’s seen them before, seen more of them than half the crew, most likely, in all the times they’ve helped one another up from the deck, blackened and bleeding, and yet every time she teases him, his skin flushes warm. He thinks of how soft she was, when he first knew her, and how kind she’d been, and how resting his head against her hadn’t been so bad -

“What about you, Blaine?” she asks, breaking his reverie and his unfocused stare. “What do you want?” 

“A soft bed,” he says, and thinks, _And a hard body._ He doesn’t have to say it. She’s known him for half his life.

All the same, Santana orders her crew to bring the ‘Princess’ into the next available port. She tells them it’s because she’s sick of the sight of their sunburned faces, and that she wants to bury her face in the tits of the first girl to give her the eye. She tells them she wants to lose herself in soft warm flesh until she forgets her name and that they’re welcome to the same, and the men grin and cheer and haul on the ropes and pray for a good head wind. 

In the relative silence of her cabin, Santana tells Blaine that they’re low on food and lacking for excitement. “I need you to find us something to do,” she tells him, and he frowns slightly, brow furrowing. 

“You’ve got a smile that’ll get you onto any ship you choose,” she says. “Just - find us something worth running down, doesn’t matter what the cargo is if we can sell it. Take a walk, Blaine.”

Blaine agrees wearily. It’s been as long for him since he’s found someone to help warm his bed and his body as it has for her, and he wants that for himself. He wants to find someone - some _man -_ to help him unwind the tension in his spine and his shoulders, but orders are orders. He tries not to look sullen, and knows he fails when Santana pushes herself to her feet and crosses the floor to stand before him, tilts his chin up with one strong finger.

“Don’t pout,” she tells him. “There’ll be enough time for you as well. I just need one afternoon and you can have all night.”

“You promise?” he says, and she nods and presses a kiss to the space between his eyebrows. He sighs and the fight slips off of his shoulders. He’s never been good at telling her no. 

 

When the ship docks, Santana tosses him a purse full of coin from the drawer of her desk and he dons his finest frock coat. He washes his face and his collar and scrubs his nails, and he slips away from the ‘Princess’ just as the port begins to wake, anonymous and ignored.

By the time the sun is reaching its peak, Blaine has found the ship he thinks may be their best shot at a haul that they can sell. She’s old and she sits heavy in the water, and she flies a British flag. Her figurehead is newer, a slight woman with small breasts and a long waist, her hair flowing as tactile as the sheer cloth that hides her modesty back toward the ship, despite being carved from wood. Blaine slips his coat from his shoulders, and finds a quiet spot in the shade from which to observe the coming and going of her crew. She’s being made ready to depart, he thinks, but she doesn’t look like anything the ‘Princess’ couldn’t catch, full as she is of fresh fruit and rich cloth. 

What clinches the deal, though, is the young man he sees on the deck and who heads slowly down into the harbour. Judging by the wobble in his legs and the washed out, sickly hue to his skin, Blaine doesn’t believe he is a natural seaman. When he is joined by a smiling woman with beautiful hair and lace gloves who links her arm through his, Blaine’s suspicion is confirmed. They walk together, and Blaine’s gaze trails after them. He holds her, Blaine thinks, as if he is scared of what touching her means, and when he leans in to press a kiss to her mouth, it looks almost as if he kisses her cheek instead. Blaine smiles to himself, and pushes his arms slowly back into the sleeves of his own coat. He may not be an expert in these matters, but he’s been with a lot of men who - for many reasons - couldn’t claim him if they wanted to. He doesn’t think this one is any different.

Blaine follows them across the harbour, stopping when they do. He talks to market folk about supplies for the ‘Princess’, shows them that he is good for the money, and keeps one eye always on his actual quarry - the man in the bright coat and the breaches that sit a little too tight across his thighs. 

They stop again at a small shop - a room, really, the proprietor a woman in plain skirts, her skin scrubbed to shining - to buy something Blaine has never seen before. When they move on, he approaches with caution. The woman is selling small bowls of flavoured ice, and he tries a little warily. It is light and refreshing, and he enjoys it so much that he consumes the rest with such speed that it numbs his lips and freezes his brain. The proprietor laughs, and Blaine grins, and when he looks around, the man in the beautiful coat is gone. Blaine curses beneath his breath and buys two more bowls of ice, one for him and one for Santana, who enjoys exotic treats when she can get her hands on them.

Blaine carries the desserts back across the harbour and ducks inside of a tavern. He’s seen some of the ‘Princess’’ crew entering and leaving, and he knows there’s a woman here that Santana has enjoyed before. He crosses the floor and heads up the stairs, balancing both bowls in one hand to hammer on the door of the largest room before throwing it open.

As he suspected, Santana lies naked and entirely unashamed beneath the sheets of the bed, though the woman she’d been with is scrambling to leave. Her thighs are thick and strong and a pale tan, and her blonde hair is pink in places. When she glances at him, he sees that her eyes are a warm, compassionate brown. She pulls a slip on to cover her nakedness, and Santana’s gaze only undresses her again. She is still searching for her shoes when Blaine moves past her to pass Santana one of the bowls.

“I know which ship,” he says, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. Santana sits up, the sheet falling from her naked breasts. She doesn’t bother to pull it back up. The blonde stops to stare at her, and Santana gestures for Blaine to hand her a coin, which she then flicks towards her companion. She catches it with the ease of practice.

“Buy us dinner,” Santana says, and then, “And Quinn - not fish.”

The woman - Quinn - laughs, deep and dirty and infectious, and Blaine glances back at her just as she pulls the door closed behind her. In the bed, Santana takes a mouthful of ice - rapidly becoming slush - that Blaine brought for her, and then devours the rest quickly. She doesn’t say anything or thank him, but she rarely does. If she hadn’t enjoyed it, she wouldn’t have eaten it. Instead, she runs a finger around the edge of the bowl and sucks it suggestively into her mouth.

Once she has finished, she puts the bowl aside and asks Blaine to tell her more. As he speaks, she climbs from the bed and stretches long and leonine towards the rafters, her spine arching, the warm brown of her skin shining in the afternoon light. She pulls on her breaches slowly, and lets her shirt drape over her head before she tucks it into her waistband. She’s both shameless and beautiful, he thinks, and it’s still odd to think of her nude.

“She’s the last ship in the harbour,” he says. “The one with the newly carved figurehead. She was being loaded this morning, but she’s old and heavy. Two passengers, rich looking. Might be worth something? Cargo is expensive regardless.”

Santana has known Blaine for a long time, and she stops pulling on her boots to look at him. He won’t meet her eyes, just stares down at his hands, at his nails. 

“One of yours?” she asks, and Blaine shakes his head, shrugs a shoulder.

“Probably not,” he answers softly, “But he and his lady wife will definitely be worth your effort.”

Santana nods her head and stamps her boots more firmly onto her feet before tying her sash around her waist and her sword belt around her hips. 

“Seems we have a plan,” she says. “Tell the crew. Find out which way she’s headed.”

She gives him his night to find someone to warm his bed with him, and then leaves it another day for the ‘Rachel’ to be well out of port. 

It’s not sport, she says, if they leave at the same time.

 

It takes less than two days to run the ‘Rachel’ down, even with the head start. She is, as Blaine suggested, old and heavy, though the figurehead is new. She offers little resistance, despite putting up all signs of a fight in the beginning. Santana and her crew take her easily, and Santana has her men bring anything up on deck that could be of value.

She sends Blaine to check the cabins for the same - anything they can sell, be it jewels or silver. If it’s valuable, it’s hers. Or it’ll be hers until she can sell it, anyway. 

Santana is still stalking the deck, her eyes on the captain of the ‘Rachel’, a tall man with clumsy feet and a winsome smile whom she instantly mistrusts, when her men bring the two passengers up from below. The man is slim and looks sick, his pale skin grey despite the sun and the warmth. His wife is - Santana cocks her head, the hand not wielding a cutlass going to her hair, running through it to push it back from her face. His wife is beautiful, with bright blue eyes and a birdlike quality that Santana finds appealing. She is tall and she seems strong, and Santana wants nothing so much as she wants to press her lips to the pale, intimate flesh exposed by the neck of her gown. She breathes in and gestures for the two of them to join the ‘Rachel’s crew.

It takes less than no time for the man to waver and collapse onto the deck, going down in a windmill of bright blue silk. Santana narrows her eyes and walks towards him, poking him with the end of her cutlass. 

“Running down the ship?” she asks Blaine, when he reappears from the cabins, a sack of treasures slung over his shoulder. He dumps it with the rest, and slaps her hand away from the man. 

“Stop it,” he says, and kneels beside him, pushes his hair back from his face. He thinks he’s beautiful, beneath the grey. His mouth is wide and generous, and his cheekbones soar like wings. “Help me get him across.” 

Santana barks an order, and two of her crew gather the man, slinging him over one of their shoulders. Santana tells them to put him in her cabin, and then offers to escort his wife across personally. She is bubbly and open, and she says that her name is Brittany, and that her husband is Kurt, that they’re headed for Jamaica and Santana smiles at her and lets her talk. 

They may be in the Caribbean but they’re not going to make it to their home, she thinks. Best not to burden this creature with that knowledge yet. 

It takes until the sun is dipping on the horizon for Kurt to moan and stir. Blaine has been sat with him the entire time, dabbing clean water on his lips and removing the heaviest layers of his clothes. When his eyes begin to blink open, Blaine is sitting patiently on the bed, his legs crossed and his heart hopeful. In his hands, he holds an orange, liberated from the ‘Rachel’ when they boarded her. He holds it so close to Kurt that Kurt struggles to focus on anything else.

Blaine struggles to focus as well, because Kurt’s eyes - once they’re open - are as clear a blue as the summer sky, and Blaine knows that he’s lost, no matter what the future holds.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the Summer Challenge prompt: Carnival.
> 
> And yes, it's even more tenuous than last week!

It takes almost a whole week and a mill pond sea for Kurt to emerge from the cabin he has been appointed. Blaine hovers by his shoulder, as he has done since they first took him and his wife aboard, and Santana has grown weary of the attention and time that Blaine is devoting to the man. It’s time that should, in the usual course of things, be devoted to helping her run the ‘Princess’. In their quiet moments, when Blaine brings her her food and runs through their books and finances for her, she tells him as much, that if Kurt and his wife don’t turn out to be worth their trouble soon, she will put them off at the next port.

“You won’t,” Blaine says, not bothering to look at her as he refills her wine. She taps her long nails on the edge of her desk, and curses at him, and it annoys her almost more than his absence from duty that his smile remains small and enigmatic despite her clear irritation. When he does glance up, his eyes are clear and honey brown, and she knows - objectively - that Kurt would be a fool to turn him down. “Unless you’re trying to get me off of your ship as well?”

Santana’s teeth click together at the implication, and she stares at her hands, plays with the rings glittering heavy and gold on her fingers to hide her surprise. “You wouldn’t,” she says, but she’s not as certain as she’d like to be. Not as certain of the future as some of the ‘Princess’’ crew had once believed her to be. “Not after everything I’ve done for you.”

“You didn’t do it all for me,” Blaine replies, and this time he does meet her eyes, trades stare for stare, and Santana breaks first, bows her head and lets her hair form a curtain around her face. “Give him a little time,” he says softly, and Santana nods her head and gestures for him to leave.

 

On the fifth day since they overran the ‘Rachel’ and took him and his wife aboard, Kurt finally appears on the deck of the ‘Princess’. He wears the blue coat he wore when they captured him, despite Santana’s offer to find him something more suitable, or at least less smelly. He’d refused politely, and Blaine had taken the blue coat away to clean for him as best he can with the resources he has. Now that the motion of the ship feels less violent, he stands on the main deck, swaying slightly with the waves, with Blaine an almost constant shadow beside him. He looks around him, and then turns to Blaine.

“Have you seen my wife?” he asks, and Blaine’s brow furrows. Kurt sighs. 

“The blonde woman,” he tries, and Blaine’s head tilt is almost birdlike. 

“I know who she is,” he says, and it’s true. He couldn’t forget the woman if he wanted to. The memory of her is a band of solid gold around the fourth finger on Kurt’s left hand. “I don’t know where she is right now.” 

“But she’s aboard?” Kurt presses, and the furrow between Blaine’s eyebrows deepens.

“Where else would she be?” he asks, and Kurt grimaces and stares down toward the still blue of the ocean. Blaine snorts a laugh.

“We don’t throw people overboard, Kurt,” he says, and Kurt looks at him again, at the mirth in his tea stained eyes and the lines in his sun browned face when he smiles. He smiles in reply, because it feels impossible not to when Blaine’s teeth flash white in the bright morning sunshine. 

“All the stories I heard as a child imply otherwise,” Kurt says, as neutrally as he can manage. “I don’t exactly have extensive personal experience.” 

Blaine gestures to himself, and to the rest of the ‘Princess’. “You have more than enough experience,” he says, “Have I done anything to suggest that your life is in danger?”

Kurt has to admit that Blaine has not. He has been nothing but gentlemanly, which was unexpected. In fact, Blaine has read to him from his books, although not from his Bible, and Kurt has been surprised daily by how much Blaine knows. 

“No,” he says, “You have not. But I do distinctly remember a sword being waved at me.” 

Blaine laughs again, and looks up sharply when he hears Kurt’s name called from above him. He tugs on Kurt’s sleeve and points up into the rigging. Kurt’s colour drains as he takes in the sight of his wife high above him, her long limbs encased in dark breeches and a light shirt, Santana climbing up the rigging beside her with a knife between her teeth. Brittany waves, and Blaine waves back, and Kurt stares from Brittany to the side of Blaine’s head and back again. When his knees start to buckle, it’s Blaine’s strong hands at his elbow that stop him from falling. 

He offers a wan smile, and Blaine’s answering one is full of a hope that Kurt knows he can’t afford to return, for all the ways that his stomach swoops when Blaine’s hands grip him and keep him upright. _Not again_ , he thinks, and firmly crushes the memory of Chandler’s smile, and the press of his lips against his own and the way his hands had looked as they danced across the keys of the piano in his mother’s morning room. Instead, he turns his gaze upward to where Santana is now sitting beside his wife, using her knife to slice fruit.

“Should they be that high?” he asks. “Is that - I don’t remember Finn ever climbing that high on the ‘Rachel’?” 

Blaine looks up to where Santana and Brittany sit, high above the earth and closer to God if he should choose to strike them down, and shakes his head. 

“They’re safe,” he says, “Santana won’t let her come to any harm. She’s an artist in those ropes, I promise you. And besides, she firmly believes that if you want a job done -”

Kurt’s apprehension morphs slowly into a laugh, and Blaine considers that it sounds musical, almost. “-you should do it yourself,” Kurt says with a smile. “My father would always say the same.” 

In another world, he thinks, his father would probably have enjoyed knowing a woman like Santana. He glances up again, and sees a breeze stir in Santana’s hair, worn loose around her face. She glances down at them, and then hauls herself up to her feet, hollers for her men to open the sails. She’s as comfortable in the ropes as she is with both feet on the deck, and Kurt feels nausea rise in his stomach. He turns his gaze back to Blaine, whose warmth is a comfort even if he won’t let himself think of it.

“Tell me about her,” he says, because listening to Blaine’s voice has been a small pleasure aboard the ‘Princess’, and because Blaine speaks easily and freely about the things he cares about. (There’s no girl ashore, Kurt has discovered, though Blaine says little more than that. Kurt wonders who there is, and tries not to hope that there’s no one.)

Blaine looks up into the rigging again, at Santana as she helps Brittany back down. Brittany, who had appeared on deck the day after she was essentially kidnapped in her hooped skirts and her tight bodice and who had asked if there was anything she could do. Aboard the ‘Rachel’, she had been confined to her cabins most of the day, reading and sewing. She had made her way up to the quarter deck and asked question after question with such innocence and sincerity that Santana had found herself answering each and every one, explaining the workings of the ship to her whilst Brittany smiled sweetly. 

On the second day, Santana had offered to take her down to her own cabin and find her clothes more suited to life aboard the ‘Princess’, and they had disappeared together for hours. When they reappeared, she wore dark breeches and a shirt over her corset. On the third day, Santana had begun to show her how to scale the rigging, one hand on the small of her back and her knife between her teeth, the going slow until they were both high amongst the ropes. Blaine can’t help but be impressed by the ease with which Brittany has adjusted to living on the ship, and worry about the way Santana looks at her.

“What do you want to know?” he asks, and Kurt shakes his head.

“Tell me how you both came to control this ship,” he says, and Blaine laughs and shakes his head.

“Long story short,” he says, “She took a knife to captain in his sleep, slit his throat from ear to ear.”

Kurt makes a noise and Blaine looks at him, offers him a small smile that only turns the corners of his mouth up. It’s not a look Kurt ever wishes to see on Blaine’s face.

“Does it make a difference if I tell you he deserved it?” he asks, and Kurt doesn’t say anything. Blaine holds out his hand and gestures back towards Kurt’s cabin. “Come with me?” he says, “I’ll tell you everything.”

They return to Kurt’s cabin, and Blaine closes the door and then the curtains, lights the lamp on Kurt’s desk. As the light flickers and then flares, casting a glow across the floor, Blaine slowly unlaces his shirt and pulls the back up, turning to show Kurt his exposed skin, crisscrossed with old scars that stand in stark white relief against the tan of his skin. Kurt shifts from his seat, stands to run his fingers over the marks, and Blaine shivers and drops his shirt, tucks it back in quickly. He dims the light and pulls the curtains back open.

“Why?” Kurt asks, sitting back down in his chair. Blaine perches on the edge of the bed.

“Because he disapproved of everything about me,” Blaine replies. “Because having me aboard was like inviting the devil in.” He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “Because I sleep with men,” he says, “And because my father was some anonymous seaman whose skin was the wrong colour, and because I didn’t realise when he took me on that he thought he could whip the devil out of me.” 

“And Santana?” Kurt asks softly. Blaine’s eyes are huge, expressive and wet and Kurt can feel the tremor in his own hands where they grip the arms of his chair.

“Santana used to pick me up and hold me against her. She’d stroke my hair and clean my skin and she’d promise that before either of us saw out another year, she’d let the devil out of him.” Blaine smiles at the memory, blinks rapidly until the moisture in his eyes slides slowly down his cheeks. 

“What happened?” Kurt asks, finds a clean handkerchief in his drawers and passes it to Blaine, who takes it without thinking and wipes his face with his fingers instead. He laughs at himself when he realises what Kurt had passed him. 

“Nothing,” he says. “Everything. The things he despised in me he loved in her. He first saw her in a carnival parade in Mexico. She wore bright colours and a mask and danced until she hypnotised him. He bought her from a whorehouse three days later, stroked her skin like she was made of something precious.”

Blaine pauses and the corners of his mouth turn up again. “She used to curse him in Spanish until he was terrified of her,” he says. “She tied fragments of mirror in her hair that cut his fingers when he grabbed her. And still he treated her like he thought she was mystical, as if she could predict the changing of the tides.” He sighs and shakes his head. “He was cruel, and she knew it as well as I did. The things he did to her didn’t bruise her skin like it did mine, but I don’t think he ever saw her as human. She did what she did for herself as much as she did it for me. We threw his body to the waves and we haven’t looked back since. I’m not sorry, and I won’t apologise or pretend I am.”

Kurt swallows hard and nods his head, and blinks hard as Santana’s shadow passes the window. Blaine dabs at his face with his handkerchief and then drops it on the desk.

“I have work,” he says abruptly, and pulls open the cabin door. “Should I tell your wife you need her?” 

Kurt shakes his head and blinks, and Blaine is gone from his cabin with barely a backward glance. Kurt removes his jacket and lies down on the bed, and tries not to think about the pain that the ‘Princess’ carries across the oceans with her, and how it’s both so different from and so very similar to the wounds he left in London what feels like a lifetime ago.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: outdoor sporting event
> 
> Research notes: Tortuga means 'turtle', as in 'Turtle Island'. Isn't that cute? It was in decline by this (totally undefined) period in history but fuckitamiright? Also, bareknuckle fighting was tots mcgotes a thing. Woo!

Blaine avoids Kurt for the next five days. Other crew members bring him food and water, and he finds small ways to make himself useful - sewing and darning, mostly, once it becomes apparent that he knows how. Brittany brings him two of her dresses, and asks him if he is able to make them into breeches for her.

“Not without scissors,” he says, too tired and too preoccupied by his conversation with Blaine to argue with her. She seems comfortable and he knows that he can’t stop her from hauling herself up the rigging.

“Excellent,” she says, and he thinks he can hear the clicking of her brain. She leaves him with her dresses, and a promise to find something he can use to pull them apart. He stores them for her, brushing out the creases in the fabric with his hands. It keeps him from sitting idle, the sewing, and it keeps him from focussing too much on how little he sees of Blaine, especially when he’d been such a constant presence in the beginning.

It has to be deliberate, he reasons, because the ‘Princess’ isn’t that big. He hears him occasionally. Hears his voice outside of his window, the familiar timbre of his singing and the ring of his laughter, and it aches in his chest, an almost physical pull. But when he opens his cabin door, the most he sees is the back of Blaine’s head as it vanishes below deck. Often he doesn’t even see that. When the light fades and he has to give up the stitching, he wonders what he did wrong, and whether or not he can undo it.

 

For his own part, Blaine entrenches himself in his duties. He inventories the stores, and then the hold, makes lists of what is saleable and what is not. He catches up on the work he has left because of Kurt, and buries himself in his own bed when he is too tired to keep his eyes open any longer. He tries to forget the conversation he had with Kurt, and tries harder not to think about what Kurt must think of him now. 

Kurt, who he thought might kiss him some day. Who might do more than kiss him, possibly. Kurt, who must now see him and think of him as a murderer, or complicit at least. Kurt, with his fine clothes and his breeding and his future, and Blaine, with none of that. The son a runaway and a man with no name. He bows his head and tries resolutely not to think about it. 

It’s hard, though, with Brittany dancing around the deck. Her new breeches hug her thighs, and her corsets pull in her waist, and her smile is as infectious as her periwinkle eyes are bright. She catches his hands and pulls him into her dance with her, and the laugh in her voice when she sings draws his own voice from his lungs. He finds in her a joy that he’d almost forgotten, but she does make it hard to ignore the twist of loneliness in his chest, and the longing he feels to the ends of his fingers. 

He always breaks away from her when he sees Kurt’s door open, and she gazes after him, bereft and alone. 

Santana hauls him aside eventually, corrals him in her cabin and pins him to a chair, her hands on either arm effectively trapping him in place. 

“Talk to me,” she says, her voice carrying a hint of an accent when she’s concerned. Her eyes are worried, and Blaine feels himself shrink. 

“I told him,” he says. “About us. What we did. I showed him. I don’t - he’s not like us, I don’t want him to look at me with pity on his face.” 

“Seems like you don’t want him to look at you at all, querido,” she says. Her hair tickles his hands and he can see down the front of her shirt. He closes his eyes and exhales slowly.

“I want him to do more than _look at me,_ Santana,” he says, and he can’t keep the bitterness from sticking in his throat. “I want him to - I want him to kiss me, to fuck me. To bury his hands in my hair and make me forget everything. I want to do the same to him. I want to watch his skin turn pink and his dick get hard, and I want to lose my mind between his thighs and I - I’m not sure he -”

Santana doesn’t even blush. She’s heard more and seen worse. “That he even likes men?” she says easily, and Blaine laughs and _thunks_ his head back against her chair.

“I think he knows he likes men,” he says. “I just don’t think he’s ever _been_ with one.”

Santana stands up and puts her hands on her waist, long fingers curling around until they almost touch in the middle. 

“You need to work it out, chiquita,” she says. “That boy looks for you like you’re the moon and stars. You can’t just abandon him here. They’ll eat him alive.”

Blaine nods his head, and wishes fervently that he knew what to do.

 

Santana puts the ship in at Tortuga. She doesn’t say anything, only anchors the ‘Princess’ off the coast and orders a compliment from the ship into the port. Blaine opens his mouth to protest, and she shakes her head.

“You’re wound tighter than my abuela’s wimple,” she says. “If you don’t get in the boat, I’ll throw you over and you can swim.”

Blaine stares at her and at his hands, rubs his knuckles. There used to be a man here, a boxer, tall and lithe, tattooed and beautiful, that he’d bruised his hands against and his thighs upon. Maybe he’s still around. He doesn’t argue again, only collects his purse and his coat and climbs into the boat.

There’s a fight in progress when they make it to shore. The night is dark and lanterns are dim, and the sound of fists hitting flesh is loud. Men cheer and coin changes hands, flashing bright as it passes between dirty fingers. Blaine eases his way through the crowd, his slim body slipping through the spaces, until he stands at the edge of the ring. 

In the middle of it, his chest heaving and his knuckles bloody, stands Elliott. He’s as tall as Blaine’s memory makes him, his chest broader, and the ink in his skin seems to move beneath the layer of sweat. Blaine’s dick stirs, and his libido heaves, and he sees Elliott spot him, gesture for him. Santana’s voice is loud in his brain - he’s wound so tight, too tight - and he slips his coat from his shoulders, and follows it with his shirt. He’s less conscious, here, of the scars on his skin. There’s not a man in the square who isn’t damaged somehow. 

“It’s been a long time,” Elliott grins, and Blaine’s smile stretches over his teeth as his hands ball into fists. The talking hushes for a moment, and then starts again, louder and closer. 

“I wouldn’t bet against the little one,” says a voice. Blaine doesn’t look for it. His eyes are fixed on Elliott and his come-on smile, and the bulge of his biceps when he curls his arms up to start. When Elliott swings, Blaine ducks and feints, and Elliott’s laugh rolls in his belly as his own fist connects with flesh. 

Coin continues to change hands, and Blaine and Elliott dance. Blaine’s fists ache but the muscles in his shoulders relax, and he thinks he’s maybe four hits away from victory when he catches a glimpse of blue from the corner of his eye. He stops for a second, turns his head, and his eyes lock with Kurt’s just as Elliott’s fist connects with his jaw and sends him reeling to the floor.

 

Kurt hears the hard intake of breath in his own ears. He feels it in his own throat, in the tightening of his chest and the lurch of his heart. The tattooed man’s fist connects with Blaine’s jaw with an audible crack, and Blaine goes down fast. 

The noise of the crowd goes quiet, or seems to. Kurt can’t hear anything but the rush of blood. His focus narrows to Blaine lying inert in the mud. Kurt’s feet move without command, and he’s crouching next to Blaine, his fingers tentative on Blaine’s skin. His opponent collects his winnings and then crouches the other side of Blaine, touches his face and lifts his eyelids, and then looks directly at Kurt. There’s no judgement in his eyes when Kurt looks at him, only concern.

“Can you help me move him?” he asks, and Kurt looks around them, wonders if anyone can tell, if anyone cares. In London, with the rumours, he wouldn’t risk helping move a half naked man from a public street.

But this is Blaine.

“Yes,” he says. “What do you need me to do?”

“Hook his arm around your shoulder,” the other man tells him, and then demonstrates. “Like this. And then, on the count of three, stand.” 

They don’t carry him far. Only to a tavern, where the boxer has Kurt help manhandle Blaine up the stairs. 

“Stay here with him,” he directs. “I’m going to find clean water to wash his face.” Perhaps it’s the concern on Kurt’s face, or the reverent way he touches Blaine’s, but he drops a hand to Kurt’s shoulder and squeezes. “It’s not as bad as it looks. He’ll be fine in the morning.”

Still, Kurt sits on the side of Blaine’s bed and strokes his hair back from his face. Blaine’s eyes blink open whilst they’re alone, and the smile he offers his crooked and pained. Kurt still bends down to press a kiss to his lips. They taste like sweat and iron, and it’s off beat and awkward, but it’s the only thing occupying his brain, so he does it again, Blaine’s hand gripping his as his brain catches on.

Kurt pulls away when the door opens, his hand leaving Blaine’s. He wipes his mouth and makes his excuses, and all but runs from the room. As he makes his slow way back to the rowboat and Santana, the feel of Blaine’s mouth against his own is the only thought he has.

That, and how different it feels to kissing his wife.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt 'fireworks'.
> 
> Research shmesearch, pfft: Debs were presented from the early 1600s onwards, so yeah. That. And fireworks - yeeeeeah. I got to the end of this and realises that 'fireworks' were supposed to be a thing. They *were* a thing, insofar as they existed in the west by this point. I rather suspect they weren't being exploded just because though. But look, *pirates*. Rules are more like guidelines anyways, right?!

Santana doesn’t ask him any questions when he meets he back at the rowboat. He climbs back in and takes a seat, and covers his mouth with his hands. She only takes a seat opposite him and rows them steadily back towards the ‘Princess’. Kurt stares at nothing, and the silence settles between them. They’re not, she knows, friends. She doesn’t have many of those. People who respect her are plentiful, and people who are scared of her are more bountiful still. Friends, though, are thin on the ground. Blaine is her friend, and she’s trying to help him. But from the look of the man - boy, she thinks, for all that he’s grown - sitting opposite her, she might have done more damage than she was aiming for.

“He’s a good man,” she offers, and Kurt startles and looks at her for a second, before his gaze slides sideways into the waves. “He’s more generous of spirit than anyone I’ve ever known.” 

A smile ghosts over Kurt’s lips, and then fades so quickly it might have been the moon on the water. He curls in on himself and Santana chews her lip. 

“Do you -” she tries, and curses softly, unsure how to ask without spooking him. “ _Dios mio_. Do you love your wife?” It’s not what she means, but it feels easier than the question she needs to ask.

Kurt frowns and looks at her, cants his head for a second in a way that reminds her a little of Blaine. Blaine’s face doesn’t usually have quite such an air of shrewd judgement, though. Kurt looks at her like he sees into her heart, and she’s unused to the sensation. She’s always been the person with the daggers in her eyes.

“She’s a fine woman,” he replies eventually, his posture still rigid and his voice mechanical. “She’ll make a good wife, and an excellent mother.”

They’re silent then, the oars breaking the water the only sound disturbing the stillness. Santana thinks of the men she’s been with, their bodies hot and sweaty against her own, the smell of them in her nose and the feel of them moving inside of her, and she remembers how they’ve left her cold and dead, every single time. 

She thinks about Quinn, whose face she finds in so many places, about the thickness of her thighs and the way the huskiness in her voice makes her feel, and how the generous curve of Brittany’s mouth makes her want to kiss her until they’re both breathless. 

And she knows without a shadow of a doubt that the words Kurt speaks are the ones he learned in London. They’re not connected to his heart, but to a rigidity of expectation and class that has him trapped. That has both of them trapped. 

When Santana reaches the ‘Princess’ and her men have helped them aboard and hauled the rowboat back into place, Santana reaches to catch Kurt’s arm. He glances down at her hand and then back to meet her gaze.

“God’s grace,” she says, and Kurt offers her a wan smile and inclines his head before he pulls away. 

 

When Kurt wakes, it’s with a start. His dreams have been full of Chandler again. The way he smiled, and the way it felt when their hands touched, and the secret smiles they’d shared over dinner at Brittany’s debut. In the quiet of his cabin, he lets himself remember sneaking away with him to the back stairs, burying his hands in his hair and kissing him until they were both panting and desperate. He remembers the shared laughter and then shushing him with his fingers against his lips when he tried to speak, and swearing one of the maids to secrecy when she saw them. 

Unlike most mornings when Chandler is in his dreams, this morning it makes him smile, his hand snaking beneath his sheets to touch and stroke himself until he comes into his fist and over his abdomen with a breathless moan. 

Once he has cleaned himself up and got himself dressed - still unusual, despite the months at sea - he leaves his cabin for the bright light of morning beyond. He leans against the side of the boat and stares toward the island, rising out of the sea like the back of a giant turtle. He doesn’t hear Brittany come up beside him until she speaks.

“Santana says they called it turtle island because of the shape,” she says. “ _Tortuga_. It’s Spanish.” 

Kurt looks at her, and she turns her head to smile at him. He covers her hand with his own and squeezes it gently, until she tilts her head. The blue of her eyes clouds with confusion. 

“Do you ever think about home?” he asks, and her face clears as she shakes her head.

“No,” she says without inflection. He wonders if she’s capable of artifice. In as long as he’s known her, she’s worn her emotions pinned to her sleeves. Her joy and her happiness, her sadness and her worries. She is easily confused, but she doesn’t lie. He smiles a little ruefully and returns his gaze to the island ahead of them.

“I miss it today,” he says. He doesn’t realise how much until the words are out of his mouth. It’s still warm here, and Kurt is starting to believe that it never really cools except when the wind picks up across the ocean. He wonders idly if it would have been cooler in the hills they were destined for, and realises he may never know. 

“I miss Lord Tubbington,” Brittany says, and Kurt snorts a laugh and bows his head. Her cat; large and objectionable and a little mean, he’d been unique if nothing else. Brittany’s laugh joins his and she bumps his shoulder with her own.

“Tortuga,” he says when the laughter stops. He rolls the word across his tongue. “Do you and Santana talk a lot?”

Brittany is silent for a long time, long enough that Kurt turns his head to stare at her profile. Her eyelashes fan her cheeks when she blinks. He wonders what the girls in London would make of the colour in her skin now, of the golden glow the sun has given her. 

“Sometimes,” she says. “And sometimes not. Sometimes she just wants to be held. Sometimes she wants to -”

Kurt blanches and shakes his head. “I understand,” he says. He has little experience of what she means. He’s never slept with his wife, nor with any of the girls he stepped out with before her, and never really with Chandler, only fooled around with hands and mouths, enough to know. Enough to start rumours.

Enough to have his hand promised to Miss Brittany Susan Pierce, and their wedding rushed. He remembers Chandler sitting at the piano in the morning room when he told him, the incline of his head and the sad lilt of the melody as he picked it out, and he remembers watching him ride away and knowing he would never see him again. The sadness sits heavy inside of him, juxtaposed with the joy of remembering his smile.

As the dream fades, the memory of his lips becomes the memory of Blaine’s and the kiss they’d shared. Chandler’s eyes fade slowly into a glowing honey gold, large and limpid, and he feels his body shake with terror.

He leans over the side of the ship and vomits into the ocean as Brittany rubs his back, her hand large and reassuring.

“I know,” she says softly, soothingly. “I know.”

 

There are fireworks the night that Blaine returns to the ‘Princess’. Kurt stands on the deck with his arms wrapped around himself, his gaze misty and detached as he watches the sky come alive. He can feel the ghost of a smile curling the corners of his lips upwards, but it still feels a little sad. The last time he enjoyed a firework display had been with Chandler, shoulder to shoulder, their hands entwined. 

“What are they for?” he asks as Santana comes up beside him. Her shirt is loose and unlaced, her vest undone. He can see the curve of her breasts, the silver of a necklace she constantly wears disappearing between them. She glances at him, and the fireworks reflect bright in the black of her eyes. He wishes he could read her face, but she’s not just a closed book to him. She’s entirely locked. 

Perhaps the key is on the chain, he thinks. If that’s the case, he’ll have to wait for her to offer it to him herself. She’s a little terrifying in her austerity, and confusing in her moments of approachability. 

“Nothing,” she says, “Probably a birthday, or a wedding. Perhaps because someone found them. No reason that matters.”

Kurt nods, and lets his gaze drift back to the display. He’s so mesmerised that he doesn’t see the small boat that crosses the harbour quietly, not until they’re climbing back aboard. Santana disappears from his peripheral vision, and is replaced by the small, trim figure of her first mate. He doesn’t speak, only leans against the rail as Kurt watches the display before him.

As it winds down, he turns to speak to Santana. “Won’t it draw attention?” he asks and then stumbles over his own tongue. He feels warmth flood his face, and thanks anyone listening for the cover of darkness. Blaine only shakes his head, though.

“Maybe,” he says. “But we’ll be gone before then. Can we talk?” 

Kurt nods dumbly, and they head together towards his cabin. Once inside, he lights his lamp and gasps when he turns back to face Blaine. The bruise on his jaw is impressive, and, Kurt suspects, painful. He almost moves to touch it, and then wonders if his touch would be welcome. He thinks about the way Blaine had kissed him back, but his brain had been spinning and confused, and besides, Kurt had run away. A frown flickers across Blaine’s face, and his fingers come up to his face.

“Oh,” he says. “It’s nothing, Kurt. It’ll heal. It’s not the worst thing to happen to me.” 

Kurt can see the scars on Blaine’s body when he blinks, so he tries to keep his eyes open, fixed on Blaine’s shoulders, on the hollow of his throat when he breathes. The warmth in his skin doesn’t fade, and he knows that he’s blushing furiously. 

“What do you want to talk to me about?” he asks eventually. 

“Us,” Blaine says. “The way I’ve acted. I don’t - I’ve never done this. I’ve never been - whatever this is, and I think you feel it, it’s new to me.”

Kurt laughs, the tension sliding from him, and Blaine risks a small smile that turns up the corner of his mouth in a wry grin. He runs a hand over his hair and looks down at his feet. Kurt - for the first time since Santana had led the raid on the ‘Rachel’ - feels like he understands something that is happening to him. When Kurt’s laughter doesn’t stop, Blaine’s shoulders start to shake as well.

“You haven’t - been with anyone like me?” Kurt asks, when he has his breath under control. Blaine’s tanned skin goes ruddy when he blushes.

“I’ve been with plenty of men,” he says, and Kurt wonders how Blaine defines ‘plenty’. Almost certainly more than one. Almost certainly the tattooed boxer from the square. He doesn’t know if he can compare, or if there’s a comparison to make. Jealousy curls ugly inside of him, though, which is new and unsettling. Blaine isn’t his to claim. 

“Of course,” he demures, and Blaine crosses his arms across his chest, shielding himself from judgement and attack.

“I’ve just never been with one like _you,_ ” he finishes, “And I don’t know how to -”

Kurt crosses the space between them and cups Blaine’s face between his palms, doesn’t let himself think about the bruise on his jaw or the surprise in his eyes, and presses his mouth to Blaine’s. Blaine’s hands tangle in his shirt and move to his face and hair, and there’s no doubting it this time. Blaine kisses him back with a fierceness born of want and fear and vindication.

Kurt can’t deny the feeling that explodes in his chest as well, that he hasn’t felt in too long, and which he knows signals the end of everything his marriage and this voyage was supposed to mean. It’s the end of everything, and the start of something new, and it burns through him like his blood is made of flashes of red.

When Blaine breaks away, his eyes search Kurt’s. Kurt thinks he sees the reflection of fireworks in his stare. He leans in and kisses him again, softly this time, and then rests his forehead against the side of Blaine’s head.

“Don’t think so hard,” he whispers, and tangles his hand with Blaine’s. “Don’t leave.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Klaine Summer Challenge, prompt: pool
> 
> **Research notes!** This week we got _really_ deep. I wondered if 18th century pistols were called something else, just in case anyone should still care about historical accuracy. Nah. Flintlock pistols are still just pistols. I did as much actual translation here as asking google for endearments in Spanish, and asking how to say ‘You’re beautiful’ in Tagalog. Research, I’m doin’ it! _Also_ , to keep up the charm and serendipity, _of course_ there’s a natural pool within walking distance. Why wouldn’t there be?! 
> 
> **Warnings:** Someone gets shot at, and there is a threat of physical violence against Brittany.
> 
> General warnings, this part is more fragmented than usual. My notes were in multiple points of view, so I just sorta rolled with that instead of ironing them out. This is what I get for leaving it until Friday to write a thing due on a Saturday.

Blaine does as he is bid and stays the night. Kurt locks the door and loses as many of his layers as makes him comfortable. Blaine plays with the laces on his shirt before finally pulling it over his head. He leaves his breeches on and joins Kurt in the small bed the cabin space allows. He can feel the thump of Kurt’s heart, and almost thinks he can hear the static jangle of his nerves. Slowly, though, he lets himself drift into sleep with Kurt’s palm firm against the soft skin of his belly, held and safe.

He awakes with a start when Santana hammers on the cabin door. Kurt’s fingers flex against his skin, but he remains otherwise still. Blaine counts it as a small mercy that she doesn’t simply come in. She’s not usually as respectful of whoever he’s with. It’s never been the nature of their relationship to observe one another’s privacy or boundaries. He turns and curls into the warmth of Kurt’s body, swears in vehement Spanish at her when she knocks again.

“Up,” she says, her voice full of laughter. “I need you out here. We’re moving out.” 

Blaine cracks an eye open. The cabin is dark, and Kurt’s body is solid, and he doesn’t want to move, perhaps ever again. 

“Blaine!” Santana’s hand slams against the door. “Don’t make me find the keys, Anderson. I will drag you out of there myself. Up.” 

“Moving, moving,” he mutters, and presses a kiss to Kurt’s sleeping face as he extricates himself. Let him sleep, he reasons. Let him relax.

He collects his shirt from the back of Kurt’s chair and pulls it over his head, tucking into the waist of his breeches. He unlocks the cabin door, and slips out quietly. Santana takes a step back and looks him over, her eyes boring into him. He straightens his spine and matches her stare for stare, until she breaks first.

“So I guess there’s still just a stick up England’s ass?” she says, and Blaine’s jaw clenches, muscle spasming as he bites back his defensiveness. 

“Can you hold on one more day?” he says instead. “I have one more thing I want to show him.” 

Santana wrinkles her nose as she turns away from the cabin door, gestures for Blaine to follow her and doesn’t check that he is before she crosses the deck to her own door. 

“Is that appropriate?” she says, mischief inflecting her voice again now. Her grin is pure filth, the white of her teeth flashing in the gloom of dawn. Blaine feels the warmth in his cheeks and presses the backs of his hands to them before burying his fingers in his armpits and hugging himself defensively.

“Funny,” he says, and doesn’t mean it. She makes a sad moue with her mouth, cants her head a little. Blaine refuses to be moved.

“A little funny,” she says. He shrugs a shoulder and doesn’t meet her stare. She sighs and pushes open her door. “Wake the men,” she tells him. “We’ll be making ready. You have as long as that takes.”

Blaine risks a smile, and she smiles back at him, leans in to press a kiss to his forehead. “Knock him out,” she whispers against his ear. “You’re not the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen naked.” 

Twisted though it comes out, he knows in his heart it’s a blessing.

 

Kurt is apprehensive as they head back into town. The morning is cool, the sun barely above the horizon and the humidity already high. His coat sticks to him, and he knows that soon he may have to give up this one last vestige of everything he knows. He thinks again of Brittany and her bare arms, the shape of her hips in her breeches. She’d been ready, he thinks, in ways he may never be. She’d been ready since they had left England for the adventure that awaited them. He’s spent so long trying to be exactly what was expected of him that he hasn’t let himself consider what anything since his kidnap could mean. 

“You’re thinking too loud,” Blaine says. There’s no malice in his voice, no judgement. When Kurt looks at him, there’s a look of polite enquiry in the unfathomable depths of his ageless eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and finds he means that as well, when the words come out. Blaine makes him want to be honest, both for himself and the burgeoning _us_ that is growing incrementally between them.

Blaine stops, and then comes back the few paces he is ahead of Kurt to touch his face. “I don’t want you to be sorry,” he says. “I never want you to be sorry. Just - trust me?” 

Kurt nods his head, and Blaine takes his hand, and they walk together through the town and into the hills.

To Kurt, every turn looks the same. If Blaine left him here, he knows he would never make it back to town, let alone to the ‘Princess’. His head spins, and just as he’s thinking he’s walked enough, Blaine stops and points ahead of him, towards a small waterfall that crashes into a natural pool of water. 

“This,” he says softly, squeezing Kurt’s hand, “Is one of my favourite places. Not many people come up here, but it’s quiet and I can think. Santana and I used to - a long time ago. I wanted to share it with you.” 

When Kurt’s eyes find Blaine’s face, he can see the ruddy blush in his cheeks. He squeezes his hand in return.

“It’s beautiful,” he says. “Thank you.” 

They don’t have much time to spend, Blaine explains. He says that Santana wants to move out, and they need to head back sooner than he would like. Kurt’s response is to kiss him quiet and tell him that they’ll have even less time if he keeps talking. Blaine ducks his head again, but his fingers find the laces of his shirt all the same. 

Kurt doesn’t look at Blaine as he undresses. He doesn’t look at Blaine until he is standing naked in the sun, and sees that Blaine is doing the same. Kurt tries not to stare, but his eyes linger on the nip of Blaine’s waist and the jut of his hips, and he tries not to cover his own body when Blaine’s eyes rake over him. Blaine’s skin is sun warmed and glows a golden brown, his muscles long and lean from a lifetime, virtually, on the ships. HIs own milk white body needs at least two years, he thinks, and the flush of his face spreads to his chest.

He doesn’t have time to overthink it, though, before Blaine whispers, “Ang ganda mo,” and reaches to pull him toward the water.

 

It’s coming back through the port that Blaine becomes aware of the whispers and the stares, the pointed fingers and gathering crowd. His head is swimming from his time in the pool, and his limbs feel loose, but he still draws his pistol from his belongings and his sword from his belt, sinking into a crouch. 

He points his pistol at one of the men towards the front of the crowd. “Speak,” he says, and the man looks at him, and then at Kurt.

“There’s a bounty,” the man says, stuttering slightly with Blaine’s gun aimed at him. “Him and the woman. News came in with a ship late yesterday. Good money for ‘em both back.”

Blaine narrows his eyes and glances back at Kurt, who stares at him with his eyes blown wide. “A bounty?” Blaine says, and thinks, they should have crippled the ‘Rachel’ when they had the chance. You don’t trade _people_. What would that have made them, if they’d gone through with it? 

“Aye,” the man says, and his grin turns sickening as a laugh bubbles from inside of him. “Money for ‘em back, though it didn’t say nothing about _whole_.”

Blaine wastes his one shot taking off the man’s ear. The crowd draws back a little, and the man claps a hand to his head and curses at Blaine, who says nothing. Just days ago, these men had bet on him to win a fight. Today they would see him torn apart for a few gold pieces.

“Can you run?” he whispers to Kurt, and Kurt nods his head, yes. If he has to, he can and will run. Blaine nods his head and reaches for Kurt’s hand. “Run,” he says.

Blaine runs right towards the gathering crowd, which parts before him. With Kurt’s hand gripped firmly in his own, he hurls himself through streets and alleys until he comes to the back entrance to the tavern Kurt and Elliott had carried him to the night of the fight. Yanking open the cellar doors, he gestures for Kurt to go before him, and draws the doors closed behind him.

 

It’s Elliott who finds them later that morning. He comes down the stairs for another cask, and Blaine lets out a huff of air as he stands. 

“I need your help,” he says, and Elliott smiles.

“I’ll say,” he says. “Man upstairs says you shot off his ear?” 

Blaine makes a face. “Deserved it,” he says with a shrug. “He made a threat against a woman that I couldn’t let stand.” 

Elliott nods his head. He’s seen Blaine’s skin, knows his story. He knows what he and Santana did, and he knows why. “So you just took his ear?” he says, and Blaine nods. “How can I help you?” 

“I need you to get a message to Santana. She’ll be waiting for me. For us.” Blaine gestures to Kurt, who sits on the dusty floor with his arms around his knees, eyes wide in the gloom. The reality of this life is writ large on his face, and the fear scares Blaine as much as anything else. He can’t make this easier for Kurt, as much as he would like to. Elliott looks at him, and then at Blaine, and he nods his head slightly.

“Leave it with me,” he says, his voice warm. He takes a step toward Blaine, his large hand curling around Blaine’s waist as he leans in to steal a willing kiss from him. He disappears back up the stairs with a cask on his shoulder and a promise to help.

When the door closes and the gloom gathers again, Blaine finds a bottle of rum and sits himself back down next to Kurt, passes it to him.

“Drink,” he says. “We may be a while.”

 

It doesn’t take long at all, Kurt thinks, when his eyes open to find Blaine’s amused ones staring down at him. He lifts a hand to wipe his mouth, and then tries to sit up. He hadn’t realised he was lying down, but he is. His head swims, and he grips Blaine’s hand when it’s offered to him. 

“Where’mI?” he whispers, and Blaine’s laugh is musical. He likes that laugh. He wants to hear that forever. He wants to make that laugh happen forever. Even if he has to live on a boat. He wants to make Blaine feel special. 

“We’re on the ‘Princess’,” Blaine says. “You were pretty out of it. Elliott helped get you to the boat.” 

Elliott, Kurt thinks. Blaine’s - Blaine’s boyfriend? Lover? Friend? He doesn’t know. He remembers the easy way he’d kissed Blaine in the cellar, like Kurt wasn’t there. He wants to be able to kiss Blaine like that. He leans in and presses a kiss to Blaine’s mouth, which responds automatically. He smiles when he pulls away, and Blaine’s mouth quirks upwards at the corners.

“What was that?” he asks, and Kurt shrugs. One day, he’s going to make sure Blaine understands that he wants to be the only man who does that. Not this day, but one day. When he knows what that means for him. To him. Blaine’s hand is firm on his arm, and he focusses on that. The touch of his fingertips. It feels good, and he tries to say as much.

“You’re a little drunk,” Blaine laughs, and Kurt thinks that that’s probably true, and probably fair. But Blaine still feels good against him. He rests his head on Blaine’s shoulder and closes his eyes again.

“Okay, sleepy,” Blaine whispers. “But when you wake up, Santana wants to talk.”

 

Santana instructs everyone to meet in the galley. She takes her usual seat at the head of the table, Blaine to her right, the rest of her men ranged around the table. Brittany stands behind her to her left, and Kurt stands beside her. Santana calls for silence, and it falls slowly.

“You’re probably all aware,” she says, “That there is now a bounty for our passengers.”

A few mumbled ‘ayes’ and one questioning ‘passengers?’ meet her questioning look, and she nods and raises her chin. 

“I want to make this very clear,” she says, leaning forward so that her shirt pulls tight across her chest. Kurt doesn’t think it’s an accident. He doesn’t think she’s shied away from using her sensuality to her advantage in her life. “The first man here who makes any noise about selling either of them meets the sharp end of my sword and the wet end of the plank. Am I clear?”

She’s met with nods and further mumbled assent. She smiles and nods, leans back in her chair, kicks her feet out in front of her, crossing her hands over her stomach.

“Housekeeping then,” she says. “To keep everyone safe, we will be flying British colours.” She looks at Kurt, who meets her eyes briefly before they slide away. “You need to lose the coat,” she says, and he nods. She looks like she wants to say more, but she doesn’t. She’ll leave that to Blaine, they can iron out their details alone, though she will fight to keep Blaine if she has to. She looks back at Brittany instead and purses her lips, gestures for her to come closer. 

When Brittany leans in, Santana takes a kiss and then lets her go, twirls a curl of hair around her fingers. “I want to say we need to do something about your hair,” she says, “But I’d miss the gold.” Brittany smiles and kisses her again, and Blaine coughs softly, shifting in his seat. 

“I don’t - you agreed to take the ship on the assumption they’d be worth something,” he says, and she looks at him.

“They were always worth _something_ ,” she says. “I thought it was gold. Now I think it’s fighting for. The same as you, _guapo_.”

She pushes herself to her feet and points around the table. “We will either return them safely to their people ourselves,” she says. “Or keep them indefinitely. The choice is theirs, not yours. Unlike Blaine, if I aim a gun at you, I will not be taking an ear. Are we agreed?”

All eyes sweep over Kurt and then Brittany, and then there are nods of agreement.

And Kurt wonders if the ‘Princess’ has just become his home, and whether or not he’s happy with that. 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Klaine Summer Challenge 2016, prompt: Picnic, or shade tree
> 
> Research notes, because I'm a detail oriented kinda gal (pshaw): Picnics, in the English language, were referenced from the mid 18th century, and in French from the late 17th. So yeah. Y'know. Playing fast and loose but what changes?

Kurt takes himself back to his cabin when the meeting is over. He knows Blaine follows him, but he doesn’t try to speak to Kurt, or to stop him. For his part, Kurt doesn’t know what to say to Blaine, or how best to behave. When he gets to his cabin, he enters silently and closes the door softly behind him. He sees Blaine watching him from a few paces away, but he doesn’t stop to reconsider. He merely turns the key in the lock and leaves it there, hoping it will be enough to prevent either Blaine or Santana from opening it from the other side. He seats himself gingerly on the edge of his bed, staring blankly at the desk ahead of him, at the curtains and the lamp, at the pile of sewing mounting on the his chair. Hysteria bubbles in his throat and he clamps a hand over his mouth to stop it.

There’s a knock at his door, and he considers ignoring it, pretending he’s asleep, but his wife’s voice is soft from the other side of the wood panels when she calls his name. If there’s anything he craves immediately, it’s the familiarity of the life he’d been resigned to when they left their home. 

“Are you alone?” he asks, moving to unlock the door. There’s a long pause and the indecipherable mumble of hushed voices followed by the sound of boots walking away, and then Brittany again, sure and uncomplicated.

“Yes,” she says. “Can you let me in?”

Kurt turns the key and cracks the door, and sure enough, Brittany stands on the other side of it and she is completely alone. The ship is conspicuously quiet, in fact, but he doesn’t think about it, only opens the door to let her inside. 

Once she is inside, he closes and locks the door again, and moves back to the bed. He sits down, and Brittany watches him quietly. Her smile is soft and a little sad, and she comes to sit beside him, rests her hand on his knee and squeezes gently.

“You can talk to me,” she says, and Kurt snorts a sad laugh.

“Have we ever really talked?” he says, and dislikes the bitterness that creeps in around the edges of his words. “About anything that really mattered?” 

Brittany stares at him, the corners of her mouth tugging downwards. It’s the saddest face he thinks he’s ever seen, and he wants to feel bad about causing it. He doesn’t, though, too caught up in the the last few weeks of his own life, in realising how he feels about Blaine, and how he feels about the turns his life has taken. 

“No,” she says. “We haven’t. But I know you, and I know you’re standing in the way of your own happiness here, because - I think you’re so used to thinking you couldn’t have it? You’re not as good at hiding as you think you are. I knew that before we left, and thought that meant that you understood as well?”

Kurt drags himself out of his self-absorbed reverie to hear that question in her voice, and he frowns, feels the way his eyebrows draw together. “Understood what?” he asks, and covers her hand with his where it rests still on his leg.

“I thought that, if you knew that I knew you’d always love _him_ more - I suppose I thought you’d heard the rumours?”

Kurt shakes his head. “I tried not to listen to rumours,” he says, “Just in case I heard about myself.” 

Brittany’s laugh is soft, and she leans into his side, wraps her arm around him and presses a kiss to his cheek and another to the corner of his mouth. “In another life,” she says, and he nods. In another life, she could have been perfect. In this one, her expressive mouth is a shade too pink and her vibrant eyes are entirely too blue. 

“Santana only asks that you tell him how you’re feeling,” Brittany whispers. “The boat’s not big enough for the two of you to keep hurting one another, and-” Brittany pauses and frowns as she tries to remember the words “-And she says if she has to make a choice, she’s keeping whichever one of you she likes better.” Her voice drops to a whisper and she looks a little concerned for him when she says, “I think she means Blaine, Kurt. But that’s only because she’s known him longer?”

Kurt doesn’t mean to do it, but the laughter that bubbles out of him feels like benediction, and he wraps an arm around her and kisses her squarely on her mouth.

 

Kurt does talk to Blaine, though. He’s up early with the sun, standing on the deck in just his shirtsleeves, his blue coat consigned to his trunk and nothing, really, to replace it with. He feels exposed, naked, almost, without the armour of his clothes to hide him. He toys with his cuffs, tugging them down over his hands, and visibly jumps when Blaine comes up beside him with a bowl of gruel in his hands. Kurt glances at it, tries not to make a face, and Blaine laughs as he swallows a spoonful before handing it over.

“I thought,” he says, “That we could have a romantic morning picnic. Just the two of us.” 

Kurt looks at him for a long moment, and then at the bowl in his hands. He doesn’t often wonder about Blaine’s life _before_ , before the ships and the whips, when he had his mother and four walls and a roof. He does now, though. He wonders if Blaine knows what a picnic is, or if it’s a word he’s read in a book with no frame of reference for. He picks up the spoon and tastes a mouthful, and concludes that - just the same as every morning - it tastes no better than it looks. He’s as used to it as he’s going to get. Supplies are short, and their chef has no tongue to boot. They eat what there is. Blaine had joked, once, that that included the rats, if things should get really tough. 

Things have not been tough enough for Kurt to know if that’s true.

“Very thoughtful,” he manages with a smile, and Blaine’s small smile turns into a grin that spreads warm across his face. 

An answering warmth blooms inside of Kurt, and he knows its name but still can’t speak the words aloud. He’s neither ready nor certain enough, for all that he’s coming slowly to believe Blaine’s assertion that the ‘Princess’ is one of the few places where they can be themselves free of danger and judgement - their tongueless cook is almost proof of that. The crew of the ‘Princess’, Blaine told him, is comprised largely of lost and damaged souls, men without prospects or simply looking for a place where they’re safe to be who they are. For Blaine, it means she doesn’t judge or harm him for the way he is and the men he chooses, and she doesn’t tolerate other men making it harder for him either. For the cook, it means shelter and work, despite the food. They’re not, Blaine says, dying of starvation. It might not taste good, but underseasoned food and gruel hasn’t killed them yet. 

It makes him wonder if this _could_ be home, and what home would mean to him if he chose it.

He tries to explain his trepidation to Blaine, and Blaine only looks at him with confusion in the impossible depths of his eyes. 

“You don’t understand, do you?” Kurt tries to keep the judgement from his voice, and he’s not sure to what extent he succeeds. Blaine only shakes his head.

“Not really,” he answers. He takes Kurt’s spoon from him and steals another mouthful of the gruel, swallows it slowly. He gives the spoon back, and turns to lean against the railing himself, crossing his arms across his chest. He looks small, Kurt thinks, and so young, standing in the morning sunshine with the laces of his shirt undone. Kurt’s close enough that he can see the smattering of short hairs on his chest, and he wonders if Blaine shaves them as well as his face, and why, when Blaine speaks again. 

“I guess,” he says, his voice slow, as if he’s puzzling the words out as he utters them, “I’ve never had any solid place to put down roots? Not even when I was small - I knew I could never stay with my mother. We were close, as close as I’ve ever been to anyone, but we both knew I couldn’t stay. It was dangerous, I guess - the way I was looked at, and talked to. She felt I was safest, or would be safest, at sea. So she got me work on the boats, I’ve told you, yes?” Kurt nods, and Blaine’s mouth turns up a little. “But that’s not - that’s not a home? So I anchored myself to things that _were_ permanent for me - to people, to things. If I stayed anywhere longer than one crew rotation, I would consider the people who didn’t change to be the family I wanted and needed. And then - then there was the ‘Princess’. As it was. And Santana. And we knew, I guess. Early on. That we were the family we were craving? She felt familiar to me, and I knew I would do anything for her. I don’t - I don’t know that the ship is my home. We could lose the ‘Princess’ and I would be okay as long as there was her. And I think, I think maybe -”

He tails off and his gazes slides sideways, forward, towards the prow. Kurt stares at his profile, and then reaches for his hand, squeezes it gently.

“I understand,” he says, although he thinks they probably both know he doesn’t. Kurt has a definition of ‘home’ that Blaine knows is the four walls and the roof he grew up under. The home where generations of Hummels have been born and lived and most likely died. 

“You don’t,” Blaine says, “And that’s fine. But - you don’t have to think of the ‘Princess’ as your home, that’s all. She doesn’t have to be.” 

Kurt can hear all of the words that Blaine doesn’t say to him. He hears the promise to be that home, if Kurt will let him. He hears the insinuation that he could be that person for Blaine. He can’t find the words to acknowledge Blaine’s trust, though, so he only squeezes his hand once more, and then drops it. 

When Blaine leaves him, Kurt stands with his hands wrapped around his bowl before he heads down into the galley to clean it.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Klaine Summer Challenge 2016, prompt: Biking or **hiking** (if you squint)
> 
>  **Research!** WHAT EVEN CONSTITUTES BOOTY WHEN YOU’RE A PIRATE, RIGHT? Turns out, literally anything. If you can sell it, eat it, drink it, or use it to fix your ship, it’s booty or loot. That includes people, which, let’s be honest, is not a surprise.

Life aboard the ‘Princess’ continues, regardless of Kurt’s inner turmoil. There’s a raid on a small ship, which they strip for supplies. Kurt continues to work in his cabin, sewing and darning, and occasionally ventures below deck to help out in the kitchen, determined to make himself as useful aboard ship as Brittany is. As part of another routine raid, they take on cloth that Brittany says feels expensive, as well as spices and a little gold. It’s a good haul, and it buoys the spirits of everyone aboard the ‘Princess’. Santana has her men stow it carefully, and then has them strip everything else they can use from the other boat as well. Though the ‘Princess’ is fully crewed, she offers safe passage to anyone who wants it. She knows exactly where she can offload rich cloth, and she has Blaine plot a course for her. When she tells him their destination, his hands freeze on the map and he stares blindly at the wide sea beneath his palms for a minute before looking at her with his eyebrows raised.

“Really?” he says softly. Santana twirls a small knife between her fingers, her smile tight and dangerous. He knows she knows why he can’t go back there, and he knows why they have to. It still shifts uncomfortably beneath his skin, causing him to shiver. She jams the blade into the tabletop when he speaks, effectively pinning the corner of the map Blaine is staring at in place. He jumps involuntarily, and then blinks and exhales sharply through his nose. 

“Really,” she says, and then, “It’ll be okay, nothing is going to happen to you. Not again.” 

Blaine nods his head, but he won’t look at her, not even when she rests her hand on his. He only stares at the word scrawled in ink on map before him. In his head, he starts making calculations. He has maybe three days, if the wind is fair. Maybe three days would be enough time - 

“Blaine,” Santana says, her voice low. “I’m going to do my best to keep him away from you, _mahal_. I promise.” 

Blaine doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have any words left in his brain or on his tongue. He only swallows hard and nods his head, and tries hard to squash the rush of panic that starts in his heart. He rubs his hands together, and then presses his fingers to his right eye. Santana pulls his hand away and holds it in her own for a long moment.

“Go,” she says, and ushers him from the cabin. “We’ll work it out later.” 

Blaine doesn’t realise he’s shaking until he’s standing in the circle of Kurt’s arms, breathing erratically as Kurt smoothes his hair.

 

True to her word, when they bring the ship into the harbour of another small town, Santana finds Blaine and presses a coin purse into his hands. 

“Find Shelby,” she says. “We’ll be here a few days. Take Kurt and get him new clothes. I’ll find you when it’s time to leave.”

Blaine doesn’t argue with her. He takes the money, nods at her, and leaves to find Kurt. He explains, sitting on the edge of his bed, that the seamstress here is a woman he knew once. She’d known his mother, before he was born. He says that she’s fast, and she’s good, and Kurt nods sleepily from where he lies, his shoulders visible above the edge of his sheets. Blaine fights the urge to reach out and run his fingers over each curve of defined muscle, to touch the lines of his collar bones prominent beneath his skin. They’re not there, not yet. 

Instead, he pushes himself to his feet and throws a pair of breeches at Kurt, grins as they land across his legs. “Get dressed,” he says, trying for levity that he doesn’t feel, “I’ll meet you outside.”

As Blaine waits, he contemplates all of the things he isn’t saying. All of the things he _can’t_ say. This town holds a lot of memories, and his fingers curl into the wood of the railing without his bidding, digging in until it’s almost painful.

“Blaine?” Kurt says, and Blaine doesn’t respond, doesn’t even consciously hear him. Kurt’s hand large between his shoulders does ground him, though, and Blaine looks round at him. 

“Let’s go,” he breathes, and he’s moving before Kurt can begin to ask him what is wrong.

 

It doesn’t take Kurt long to see that they’ve left the ‘Princess’ long before the town is beginning to stir. The morning is still grey, the sun only just rising beyond the horizon. Even so, Blaine pulls him through the streets with surety and speed, and Kurt follows without comment. Blaine doesn’t speak, and his posture is tense, and Kurt wonders what he can do to help. The answer comes to him with certain clarity. _Nothing._ He stares at the tense set of Blaine’s shoulders and lets the thought settle. There’s nothing he _can_ do, since he doesn’t know what’s wrong. He’ll have to let Blaine work this out by himself.

Blaine comes to a stop outside of a shop. He knocks on the door and waits, and then knocks again, harder this time. Kurt feels like they’re stood in the street forever, but then the door unlocks and a woman lets them in. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face in a severe looking bun, and her jaw is strong and imposing. However, her mouth turns up in an easy smile when she sees Blaine, and then her gaze slips sideways, raking over Kurt next.

“Is this-?” she asks, and a blush colours Blaine’s cheeks. He ducks his head, and Shelby’s laugh is warm, broad and encompassing. “Serious then,” she says.

“Maybe,” Blaine says. He glances at Kurt, who feels his brow knit, but the words settle in his chest easily. He doesn’t want to argue. “I’d like it to be.”

Shelby looks at Kurt again, her dark eyes appraising. “Good,” she says, eventually. Kurt feels like she’s seen into his entire life in that time. “I like him. He’s better than the last one.” 

Blaine’s mouth opens, and _those_ words sit differently for Kurt. _The last one?_ Knowing that Blaine has a life that predates him is one thing. _Hearing_ about it is- That’s something else.

Blaine doesn’t have a chance to say anything, though, before Shelby is gesturing for Kurt to stand, which he does. Something about her attitude brooks no argument. There’s one way to do things, and that’s her way. A tape measure appears from nowhere, and she tells him to spread his arms. Once again, Kurt moves without consciously registering her words. She starts to take his measurements, her hands large and deft, her head bobbing as she scratches figures onto a piece of paper with the stub of a charcoal stick.

“How long are you here?” she asks, and Blaine looks at her sharply.

“A few days, maybe,” he says. “As little time as possible.”

Kurt tries not to blanch. He hopes, fervently, that ‘a few days’ is longer than two. Standing in this small shop is the first time since Tortuga that he hasn’t felt a hollow swoop in his stomach whenever he moves. If nothing else, it suggests to him that the ‘Princess’ _can’t_ be his home, not matter how much he may want it to be. He hopes it doesn’t show on his face, but the way Shelby touches his shoulder lets him know he fails.

“I’ll take the few days,” she says to Blaine, and her smile is full of teeth. It makes her a handsome woman, Kurt thinks, with the parts of his brain not churning over the fact they may be back at sea in a matter of hours.

“Can I help?” he asks when he finds his tongue. “I can sew, and I know how to cut cloth. I trained with a woman in London. Isabelle Wright. I don’t know why I’m - you wouldn’t know her. But I-”

He stops when Shelby looks at him, her smile still curling her mouth upwards. “You’re adorable,” she says. “Certainly you can help. Come back here tomorrow. Lover boy can help you find your way.”

“I-” Kurt stammers, eyes finding Blaine’s. Blaine’s grin is full of the laughter it’s been missing all morning. “We’re not-”

Shelby actually laughs, her hands gripping her waist as she rocks backwards. “Of course, cher,” she says. “Of course.”

Kurt looks between her and Blaine, and feels the laugh that twists his mouth up again. And then he’s laughing as well, and it feels free and loose inside of him. 

They’re not lovers, but they could be. One day. Some day.

Soon.

 

When they leave Shelby, the town is beginning to wake. Blaine feels the scowl that settles on his face. He’d wanted to make it back to the ‘Princess’ before anyone here could see him. He wants to stay out of town, out of the taverns and out of sight. 

He doesn’t want to talk about why.

It turns out to be inescapable. 

As they hit the main square, Blaine sees a crowd is forming around one corner. There is cheering, and a crewman from the ‘Princess’ grips his arm and hisses that it’s Santana, that Blaine needs to stop her. Blaine stares at him, and then at the crowd, and a sigh punches out of him. 

He pushes through the crowd slowly until he reaches the front, and then his blood runs cold. 

Santana has a man pinned against the wall, her arm across his chest and her small knife pressed at his throat. She’s not speaking, and his hands are raised, a smirk curling up the corner of his mouth. For a second, Blaine considers letting her do whatever she has planned. He can’t, though. He pushes forward, and worms his way between Santana and the man, pushing her away slowly.

“Down,” he whispers, and her knife begins to lower, though her eyes do not leave those of the man now behind Blaine. She hisses a threat through her teeth, and Blaine knows just enough angry Spanish to know she wishes him dead. It’s not as if he doesn’t know why.

The last time the ‘Princess’ had run across Sebastian Smythe, he’d almost cost her Blaine.

 

Blaine comes back to himself just as Sebastian’s hand inches lower on his body, pressing warm and wide against his abdomen. He pushes Sebastian’s hand away and steps out of his embrace, turning to face him. Sebastian stands up straighter, his smile spreading across his face, lascivious and wanton.

“Hello, killer,” he says, reaching for Blaine’s face and leaning in to kiss him. Blaine takes another step backwards.

“No,” he says, and a frown flickers across Sebastian’s face. 

“No?” he says. Blaine nods. He’s aware of Kurt in the crowd behind them, of how much he doesn’t know. When he glances back at him, Kurt’s face is thunderous, and then he’s turning away, pushing past the few remaining gawkers, out of the square and back the way they had walked together only hours earlier. His pace is fast, and Blaine knows from experience that rage is blind.

The only option Blaine has is to run after him.

 

He catches up to him on the cobbled streets near Shelby’s shop. 

“Talk to me,” he says, reaching for Kurt’s arm. Kurt shakes him off. 

“Who is he?” he says. Blaine stops walking.

“No one,” he says, and then, softer. “Almost someone. I - He - We. He was nearly someone, and then he wasn’t. Fuck, Kurt. Stop walking, please?” 

It’s closer to begging than he’s happy with, but Kurt does stop. He turns slowly to face Blaine, walks slowly back towards him.

“I don’t like him,” he says. “And I don’t like him touching you like that. I - I want to. Touch you that is. Just me.”

Blaine doesn’t let him get the rest of the sentence out before he throws himself forward, crossing the distance between them in short strides. His hands bundle in Kurt’s shirt, tugging him forward towards him. He crushes their mouths together with enough force to split his lip, and he doesn’t care about the taste of iron on his tongue. It’s a kiss with too many teeth and nothing like enough finesse, but it’s full of everything he’s feeling inside of him. Every ounce of longing and need is thrown into kissing Kurt. 

He pulls away to breathe, rests his forehead against Kurt’s, and smiles when Kurt’s hands stroke through his hair and down his jaw, and he breathes out a sigh that could be a sob when he realises that Kurt’s not pushing him away but pulling him closer, always closer.

It’s not quite what he imagined it would be, when he thought about _him_ kissing Kurt for the first time. But it’s good, it’s important. Kurt wants him. He’s wanted. The feeling brands itself in his chest, indelible and forever..

He doesn’t mean to cry, but he does anyway.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Klaine Summer Challenge 2016, prompt: Boardwalk
> 
> Research lite because I am lightweight: What the fuck could Sebastian have poisoned Blaine with that would cause blindness? Best guess, ethanol. Though I've no idea if or how he'd have got hold of pure ethanol! So yeah, non-specific "something something BLINDESS OH NO", y'know. Nothing changes. Also, how do the fastenings on breeches work? And what went underneath them? I am such dedicated.

Kurt pulls away from him a little, tugs the dirty sleeves of his shirt down over his hands and presses the material to Blaine’s damp cheeks.

“Talk to me,” he whispers, and Blaine shakes his head. It’s not that he doesn’t want to, he just can’t find his words. The ones in his head are a confused jumble of Spanish and English and Tagalog, and not a single one will make it past his teeth whole regardless. Kurt’s shirt covered fingers press against the split in his lip, and that grounds him more than the gentle words, a stab of pain spiking through his body.

“Ouch,” he winces, and twists his head away.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Kurt says, gripping his chin, and then, studying his face, “You look awful.”

Blaine grins at that, aims for rakish but knows he misses when his smile pulls his lip open again. It’s worth it for the smile that turns the corners of Kurt’s mouth up though, and for the flush that turns his pale skin pink. _Gods_ , he wants him, almost so much it drowns out logic and reason.

“Do you want to talk now?” Kurt asks again gently, and Blaine’s gaze shifts from Kurt’s face to his own feet. He frowns and presses his tongue into the split on his lip as he tries to think.

“Yeah,” he says eventually. “But not here.” 

Kurt nods his assent and lets Blaine lead him as they pick their tentative way back towards the harbour and the ‘Princess’.

 

They end up in a room above a tavern on the waterfront. Blaine turns a heavy iron key over in his hands as Kurt dips a rag in warm water to clean his face with. Blaine jumps slightly when Kurt sits in front of him, his foot tucked under his thigh so he can face Blaine. The dirty sleeves of his shirt are pushed up his arms and he has loosened the laces at his throat. Blaine feels his mouth go dry, even though he’s seen Kurt both shirtless and naked. There’s something in the promise of _more_ that appeals to him.

“I love you,” he whispers, eyes on the column of Kurt’s neck and the sharp relief of his jaw, on the hollow of his throat and the sound of his breathing, which jumps sharply at the words. His own brain cartwheels as he catches up with himself, and he looks up sharply to find Kurt’s eyes boring into his own. He’s as sure as he’s ever been that the words are true, but something in the piercing blue of Kurt’s appraising stare makes him say it again. It feels right in his mouth, the same way it does when he says it to Santana, when he’d said it to his mother as a child. He _loves_ Kurt so much it’s an almost physical ache.

Kurt doesn’t say it back, and Blaine thinks that that’s okay. It doesn’t make it not true. It only makes it not time. 

Instead, Kurt uses the damp cloth he has between his hands to wipe gently at Blaine’s face and, when he’s satisfied that Blaine isn’t damaged, he leans in a presses a kiss to his mouth, and Blaine glances one off of his cheek as he pulls away, which makes Kurt smile. He doesn’t speak at all until he’s ringing the cloth out in the bowl on the dresser.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he says. Blaine thinks perhaps he’s aiming for nonchalant, but the tension in his spine and the stiffness with which he stands expose him. 

“Maybe not,” Blaine says, “But I want to. Sit with me?” 

He pats the edge of the bed. Kurt hesitates for a moment and then exhales long and heavy, covers his face with his hand. He’s nervous. Blaine understands that. He’s nervous as well, and there’s a phantom pain burning behind his eyes that he can’t blink out or rub away. He doesn’t really realise he’s trying until Kurt’s hands catch his and ease them back into his lap.

“Alright,” he says, his voice soft, softer than it had been outside, when he’d walked away from Blaine. Blaine has a lot of experience with people walking away from him, and not a great deal where they choose to stay. He studies Kurt’s face, and smiles when he sits opposite him, tucking his stockinged foot beneath his thigh. Kurt keeps Blaine’s hands in his own, his thumbs rubbing over his knuckles, gentle and reassuring. Blaine tries to order his thoughts, but the words jumble on his tongue regardless. He huffs a sigh and tries to pull his hands from Kurt’s, blinking furiously again. When he can’t get his hands back, he tips forward instead, burying his face against the warmth of Kurt’s body. It’s easier, pressed against the solidness of Kurt, to say the words crammed into his mouth, even if they start somewhere in the middle of the story. It’s easier if he can’t see the judgement. 

“You know I told you that when you don’t have a home, you make people your home?” he says, and feels Kurt’s assent rumble against his cheek. “That was - that was Sebastian, nearly. I needed - after we took the ship, when we had what amounted to freedom? Santana and I revelled in that for a while. We stopped in a lot of places, made a lot of rash and dangerous choices, and we’d come back to one another at the end of every trip ashore and head back to the ‘Princess’ and this life we were building. It was - it was _fun_ , after the holding pattern we had been stuck in, to be able to find someone to share a drink and a night with. We had a lot of fun. Santana made a lot of contacts. I - I met Bas.”

Blaine sighs, curls his hands into balls in Kurt’s, exhales a shaky sigh. He hasn’t spoken about Sebastian in over a year. They haven’t been back to this town in all that time. Sebastian has his own boat - the ‘Dalton’, a stolen rig, shallow and fast and cutthroat - so they might never have encountered him here. They didn’t come regardless. It only figures, in Blaine’s mind, that Sebastian _would_ be here now. He probably followed them in - His breath shudders, and Kurt rubs his hands again. Blaine breathes, extends his fingers and intertwines them with Kurt’s. He doesn’t lift his head, though, keeps it against Kurt’s chest, listening to the steady thump of Kurt’s heart.

“Bas was different,” he whispers. “Different from all of the others. He spent more than just the nights with me, made me feel special.”

“You are special,” Kurt says, and Blaine laughs but doesn’t deflect the compliment, lets it settle in the crevices where ‘I love you’ will sit one day.

“You’re sweet,” he says, and then, “Bas wasn’t sweet. But after - after everything, just having someone who _wanted_ me, all of me? I was so far gone. I wanted the security of forever, and he told me as much. I wanted someone I could wake up with and not know that one of us would leave soon. He kept rooms here, in town, and we spent days holed up in them. He’d bring me food and when he said he wanted me to stay when the ‘Princess’ left, it seemed like the easiest decision in the world to say yes.”

“Blaine,” Kurt says, and he sounds pained. Blaine lifts his head at that, and sees the distress in Kurt’s eyes when he meets them. He untangles their hands and pulls Kurt into a hug that Kurt returns with ease. 

“What happened?” Kurt asks, when Blaine pulls away from him.

“I told Santana,” Blaine says, a smile curling his lips upward. “I told her that I needed to be loved, and she looked wary and told me that she loved me, and I - I told her I needed a little more than she was physically equipped to give me. And she said, flat out, that if this was about Sebastian, then I was being colossally stupid, and I told her it wouldn’t be the first time because if I hadn’t been colossally stupid, I wouldn’t be covered in scars. I told her I loved him. And she told me she’d wait, because I didn’t love him. And she needed me more.”

“Did she wait?” 

“A whole week,” Blaine says, and there’s a laugh lightening his voice again, his smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to thank her for that. Bas was in the middle of negotiations when it happened. He had food and ale set out, and I guess - I suppose he had a reputation. The other captain wouldn’t eat or drink until Sebastian had, and Sebastian wouldn’t. So I asked if it would help if _I_ ate instead, made excuses for him, and Bas didn’t say a word to stop me, just let me drink until my cup was empty and then sent me away to bed. And maybe luck has always been on my side, or maybe she was following me, but Santana caught me when I stumbled in the main saloon. I remember her hollering for help, and then it all goes black.” 

“Wait,” Kurt frowns at him, and Blaine blinks and rubs his eyes before forcing his own hands back to his lap. “What happened?” 

“Poison,” Blaine says simply. “If Santana hadn’t recognised the signs of my failing vision, I’d probably be blind now. If I was lucky.”

“How is he alive?” Kurt asks, an edge of danger and dislike creeping into his own voice.

“You sound like Santana,” Blaine says. “I don’t - Trust me, she made herself very clear. One of the crew told me all about it. She had me carried back to the ‘Princess’, as if I couldn’t have made it down the boardwalk by myself, and she stayed behind. She didn’t even wait for Bas to be up and dressed, only had his room unlocked before she threw herself through it. She had him pinned to his bed, according to the crewman who hauled her off of him, her knife at his eyes, same as you saw earlier, more or less, so angry that everything came out of her in Spanish first. But the threat was clear. If he so much as thought about me, she’d make sure she actually _did_ blind him.” 

“So today?” Kurt says, and Blaine reaches to touch him, moves to draw him further back onto the bed with him.

“Raised the spectre of a past I want to forget,” Blaine nods. “But also, if your intentions are less than honourable, you should probably watch out for Santana. She knows how to wait for revenge.” 

He watches as terror and amusement war across Kurt’s face, who eventually says, “And then what, she throws your cold dead body into the heart of the ocean?”

Blaine laughs from deep in his chest, head rocking back so hard it hits the head of the bed with an audible _thunk._ He rubs the spot and then reaches for the waist of Kurt’s breeches, tugging him closer until Kurt has no choice but to sit across his thighs.

“Probably,” he says, “But I’m joking.” And then, to clarify, “Well, not about Bas. But I think Santana actually likes you. So how about you help me forget about Sebastian’s hands, huh?” 

Blaine reaches up for Kurt’s face, tugs him down until Kurt's body is covering his own. He expects little more than a kiss, dirty if he's lucky and chaste if he's not. He does not expect the jealous urgency of Kurt's mouth on his skin, across his cheeks and his eyes and down his jaw and his neck. He doesn't expect Kurt's mouth to try to kiss away all remnants of those few days now long past. 

He doesn't expect it but he won't stop him. He gasps when Kurt's hands tangle in his shirt, tugging it up, shoving it into his armpits, holding it there with one hand and ducking lower, mouth ghosting over his nipples and his sternum, as his other struggles blindly with the small buttons of Blaine's breeches. He huffs a laugh as he sits up, uses both hands on the buttons and shifts his weight to pull them off of Blaine's hips. He loses his own shirt at the same time, and Blaine loses the ability to think in complete sentences all over again. 

“I,” he breathes, pushing himself onto his elbows, his shirt falling back down as he does so. “You don't have to. Do anything. Have you ever? I don't-”

“When I was younger,” Kurt says, and doesn’t elaborate. “And I want to. Let me?”

If Blaine ever knew the word ‘no’, he forgets it when Kurt's weight resettles between his thighs and with Kurt's hands on his hips. He flicks his tongue over his lips and nods his head, and Kurt's hands are not gentle with the linen of his undergarments when he tugs them down as well, exposing Blaine to the muggy air and his own eyes.

It’s - It’s _different_ , Blaine thinks, trying not to feel self-conscious lying half-naked in someone else’s sheets, with a boy he wants so much he hurts just staring at him. It’s not the first time Kurt has seen him unclothed, but it’s the first time he’s looked at him with such wanton desire. He leans in and presses his mouth to Blaine’s, and then shifts down Blaine’s body to press his nose and his mouth to the soft skin of Blaine’s inner thighs. He tucks one arm beneath Blaine’s bent knee, curling it around his thigh to press his hand flat against Blaine’s hip, and he looks up at Blaine, holds his gaze for a long moment, and then he takes his cock in his other hand and licks a stripe up it before sinking his mouth over the head.

It’s lascivious and dirty and Blaine groans low in his throat as his arms and shoulders give out. He flops back on the bed, his shirt gathering around his navel, his hands covering his face. Kurt’s mouth is wet and hot and he doesn’t hold back. It feels like his hands and his mouth are everywhere, and it’s been too long since anyone did this for him 

“Kurt,” he breathes, one hand moving blindly to tangle in Kurt’s thick hair. He doesn’t know if he means to hold him in place or press him down. Blaine just needs to feel him, the solid reality of him and not just the pressure of his tongue and the suction of his mouth or the constriction of his throat as he takes more of Blaine into his mouth. Blaine’s fingers tangle in Kurt’s hair and his hips thrust up, and Kurt chokes and pulls off of him, shushes him when he apologises, his voice rough and uneven.

“Don’t,” he says, and Blaine uncovers his face, finds Kurt’s impossible eyes staring up at him, and he doesn’t let Blaine look away as he trails his tongue back to the head of his cock, sucking him back into his mouth, sinking back down over him, the bob of his head and the swirl of his tongue relentless until Blaine grips his hair so hard it must hurt, pulling Kurt up and off of him, his thighs tensing and heat pooling in his belly, sparking white throughout his body as he comes with Kurt’s name almost a prayer on his breath.

He’s breathing hard when Kurt crawls back up his body, his lips red and his pupils blown, and Blaine grins at him, pulls him in to kiss him. “Let me,” he whispers into the cavern of Kurt’s mouth, and fumbles with numb fingers at the buttons Kurt’s own breeches until he can get his hand inside. He gathers his own come on his fingers and wraps them around Kurt’s cock. Kurt moans and presses his face into his neck.

“What do you need?” he murmurs against Kurt’s ear, and chuckles when Kurt’s responses is muffled by his skin. 

In lieu of an answer, Blaine does what he knows, his fingers sure and steady until Kurt gasps and grips at his skin, his teeth sinking into the juncture of Blaine’s shoulder and neck as he fucks into his hand, spilling hot over Blaine’s fingers and the inside of his underclothes. 

It takes what feels to Blaine, pinned beneath his weight, for Kurt to roll off of him. When he does, he lies beside Blaine with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Blaine rubs at his neck, and then, carefully, cautiously, tugs Kurt’s soiled clothes from his body. He deposits them on the floor, and crosses their small room to gather the sponge from the bowl of tepid water Kurt had been using before. His shirt brushes his ass as he walks, and he sees, as he comes back, that Kurt’s gaze isn’t so fixed on the rafters anymore. He smiles softly as he wipes Kurt down first, and then himself, stripping his shirt from his body as he does so.

“I,” Kurt says, and falters. “I love you, too.” 

Blaine smiles and leans in to kiss him. It may be emotion that has control of Kurt’s tongue, but he’ll take it and keep it and cherish it in the space inside his heart.

 

Santana sends Brittany to find them, clean clothes bundled into a pack on her back. Blaine is certain that he locked the door, but it doesn’t do much to stop her. She’s standing beside the bed when he wakes, her shoulders bare and her long hair in a braid over her shoulder. 

“You smell like sex,” she says, and Blaine groans and covers his face with his hands, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He hauls himself from the bed, and makes sure that Kurt is still carefully covered. Brittany stares at him, and then passes him the pack of clothes. “Cute,” she says, and neither of them look away as he pulls undergarments and clean breeches over his hips. 

“Do you want something?” Blaine asks her, and she looks up at his eyes and her smile widens across her face.

“Ah,” she says. “Yes. Santana said to tell you two things. First, that the Dalton left the harbour this morning with Sebastian on board. And second, we’ll be here all week.” 

“All week?” 

She nods her head. Her eyes are clear as the sky beyond the window, and Blaine thinks for a moment that maybe she brings the summer with her. That maybe she’s magical, and she’ll be the one who can help make Santana happy, make her smile. The feeling fades as she turns back towards the door, a key appearing from between her breasts. She turns it over in her hands, and then her face is serious, a crease appearing between her brow as she frowns.

“Treat him right,” she says, and Blaine doesn’t have a chance to respond before she slips away and locks the door behind her.

 

Blaine is sitting on the bed when Kurt wakes, his eyes opening slowly. He smiles down at him, and lets his gaze trail down Kurt’s body as he stretches.

“We have a week,” he says. “If you wanted to help Shelby with your clothes. Santana has decided we’re staying here all week.” 

Kurt doesn’t say anything, only blinks slowly and pushes himself to a sitting position. Blaine wants nothing more than he wants to drag him back down, wants to bury his face in Kurt’s body, map it with his tongue.

They have a whole week. There’s plenty of time.

In the meantime, he passes Kurt the clean clothes that Santana had supplied for him and suggests that he dress. The morning is bright, and there are barrow girls on the harbour front.

And Blaine wants nothing so much as he wants to walk back to the ‘Princess’ with his hand tucked firmly inside of Kurt’s, his heart pinned firmly to his sleeve.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Klaine Summer Challenge 2016, prompt: Beach

Kurt says that he wants to move his things from the ‘Princess’ to Shelby’s shop. He sees the light fade from Blaine’s eyes when he says it, and he’s quick to catch his hand and squeeze it tightly.

“Not - not permanently,” he says. “Just for the few days we’re here. It would help her more if I were there when she needs me.” 

In his heart, he knows it’s at least partly a lie. A night without the rocking of the waves beneath him, even accounting for the fact he’d slept with his naked body pressed hard against Blaine’s, has settled his stomach and stopped the world from careening wildly around him. His sea legs have not been forthcoming and he can’t forge a life with Blaine out there where the sea and sky meet, however much he might want to. 

He knows that now isn’t the time for that conversation, though, not when Blaine is staring at him with those golden eyes of his, so full of sadness and so resigned. Blaine has bought him back to the ‘Princess’, and is sitting cross-legged on his bed as he watches Kurt fold enough work for the next few days into a sack.

“I’d understand,” he says, and Kurt looks at him sharply. Blaine almost physically recedes across the bed, and Kurt knows - he understands. So many people in Blaine’s life have left him, and each one has taken a part of him away. He still gives himself so freely, though, and Kurt wants - in his own heart - to be Blaine’s person, to be the one thing he can learn to trust completely to not let him crash straight down through the ground and into his own personal hell. He can’t let him start falling now, even if he doesn’t have all of the words he needs.

He crosses the small floor space of the cabin and sits on the bed, drawing Blaine’s hands into his lap. He wraps his own hands around them, rubs his thumbs over the bumps of Blaine’s knuckles, revels in the feel of the callouses on Blaine’s fingers as he turns his hands over and curls them slowly between Kurt’s own. He wants, he knows with sudden clarity, to feel those hands all over his body. _Inside_ his body, maybe. Eventually. Soon. He wants to take those hands, and the man that comes with them, and keep them safe for the rest of their lives. He wants - he wants everything. The future he was promised the day he married Brittany, he wants to transmute into a future with this beautiful boy sitting before him, staring at their joined hands.

“You need to talk to me,” he says. “I can’t read your mind.”

“It’s nothing,” Blaine says to him, forces a smile onto his face. It’s been months though. Kurt has learned the tells in Blaine’s smile, if not how to make him talk when he doesn’t want to. He grips his hands though, and forces the corners of his own mouth up.

“I’m not saying goodbye, Blaine. I’ll be right across town. You can come with me, even.”

Blaine shakes his head at that, and his sad eyes - huge in his face, and so full of longing and grief - bore into Kurt’s as if he can find the answers he wants to hear if he just looks hard enough. “I have work,” he says. “There are things I should be doing here.”

Kurt doesn’t know how to reassure Blaine. He wishes he did have those answers for Blaine at his fingertips but for all he’s learned to be honest about his heart, communicating its truth with words remains elusive and intangible to him. He can only tangle his fingers tighter between Blaine’s and press their joined hands to Blaine’s heart. 

“It’s just four days,” he says again. “You’ll see me as much as you do when I’m right here.”

Blaine’s answering smile is watery, and his gaze slips away too easily, but he nods his head anyway. “Let me walk with you?” he says, and Kurt understands that he’ll never quite remember how to say the word ‘no’ again himself. 

 

For all of his panic, Blaine is still sitting on a bench in Shelby’s shop by the time the sun reaches its peak each day. He leaves his boots by her door, tucks his stockinged feet beneath his thighs, and chats easily and steadily with Kurt as he works. The light in the shop is better than in Kurt’s cramped cabin, and it feels intimate and companionable to have Blaine sat with him in the shop. It’s easy to drift, to imagine a future where they could be like this always. 

As always, Kurt sighs and pushes the thoughts away. They’re not for here and they’re not for now, no matter how comforting he finds it to imagine how his life _could_ look, if they could find the right place to make it so - 

He’s more lost in his daydreams than he thinks, doesn’t notice the fading of the light or Blaine moving the lamp closer to him. He only realises how tired he’s become and how much his spine aches when Blaine’s sock clad toes slide into his line of sight, followed by his hands as he leans down. His fingers tilt Kurt’s chin up, and he bends in to press their lips together. Kurt smiles into it, lowers his sewing to his lap so he can catch Blaine’s jaw with his own hand, holding his steady. 

“You need to shave,” he breathes, when the kiss ends. Blaine grins as he sits back upright, leaning back on his hands.

“I have plans,” he says, his gaze tracking down Kurt’s body, and Kurt feels his skin flush pink. He thought that he’d been daring with Chandler, when they’d had time, but there are ways that Blaine looks at him that make him feel as innocent as a summer deb. Blaine’s laugh is rich and warm, and it makes Kurt’s stomach twist. He’d thought he’d been in love before, but it’s nothing this. 

“Indeed?” he asks, and frowns because his voice comes out breathier and higher than he’d like. Blaine smiles and nods, and pushes himself off of the bench to the floor. He presses another kiss to Kurt’s cheek, and Kurt can’t help but imagine how the scratch of stubble would feel in softer, more intimate areas. 

“Stay,” he whispers, and Blaine shakes his head. 

“We’ve got a new cargo to load,” he says. “Santana has ordered all hands.” 

“She’ll understand,” Kurt pleads, and watches as Blaine’s face flashes through a variety of conflicted emotions almost at once.

“She’s already giving me a lot of leeway,” he says. “I can’t take further liberties.” 

Kurt feels the sinking of his heart, and the empty pit it leaves behind. His face and his shoulders fall, and he watches in silence as Blaine tugs his boots back on. He looks beautiful, framed in the doorway as he is, and then - with a smile and a gentle ‘I love you’ - he’s gone. 

Kurt leans his head against the back of the door as he locks it. He knows that a conversation is overdue, he just doesn’t know how to have it, or how it will end. 

 

He puts it off until the last morning, though, spends the few days they have in comfortable, companionable silence with Blaine and Shelby. The last night, Blaine stays with him, shows him every plan he had for the stubble on his jaw as it scratches the insides of his thighs and the crease of his hips, leaving his sensitive skin abused and red. For all that his attention leaves its lasting marks, though, Blaine is a gentle, attentive lover. He reacts to every gasp, every plea, and Kurt feels like he’s vibrating out of his skin with every pass of Blaine’s tongue and teeth. When Blaine finally takes him into his mouth, his thumb rubbing tight circles into his perineum, it’s over almost embarrassingly quickly. His fingers tangle in Blaine’s hair, pulling him off of him, and Blaine takes him in his hand instead, jerking him through his orgasm.

“Do you want me to-” Kurt whispers, when he manages to uncover his face, and Blaine shakes his head. He pushes himself upright and - in lieu of anything better - uses the jug in the corner of the room to damp Kurt’s shirt to wipe him down before curling up in the negative space beside him. The weight of Blaine’s body beside him lulls Kurt to faster and deeper than he’s managed in months.

 

He wakes early, the morning barely light through the cracks in his shutters. Beside him, Blaine is still fast asleep, his breathing deep and slow. Any other morning, Kurt knows he would revel in having the time to watch Blaine sleep like this, and maybe - if he’s lucky - he will eventually have enough of those days that they become boring, lose their novelty and glow. But he doesn’t have that luxury _this_ morning. 

Extricating himself carefully from Blaine, Kurt gets up. He tugs on his clothes in silence, and slips out of the room. 

He heads down towards the harbour, as he has every morning since he moved himself to Shelby’s shop. There’s a small beach there, covered in lobster traps and small fishing boats. He picks his careful way across the rocks, until he finds a flat one he can sit on. The water is low, and the ships relatively quiet. At this time of day, he can watch the morning traffic through the harbour wall and think about everything the future holds.

And the problem he has is that the future he dreams of, sitting staring at the harbour wall, requires so much sacrifice that he can’t bring himself to ask for it, and he can’t imagine living without it now that he knows love exists for him in the world. 

Overhead, the seabirds wheel and cry, and the sun rises slowly on the eastern horizon. The noise from the ships rises in volume, and Kurt continues to sit, staring the ebb of the tide, thinking about all the things Blaine has told him during their time together. About making people his home if places can’t be. About how, for all of that, the ‘Princess’ _is_ his home. _Santana_ is his home. Blaine has his family, and Kurt knows, in his heart, that he _can’t_ be part of that.

The wind eddies, and he can feel the burn of Blaine’s beard on his thighs, and he knows he’s crying and he’s not sure he has the words to explain why. He means, also, to pick himself up and take himself back to the shop, gather his new clothes and the few belongings he has there, to head back to the ‘Princess’ with Blaine and pretend like he’s fine. But the time slips away from him, and he’s still sat on the beach, staring at the endless horizon, when Blaine comes looking for him.

Blaine takes one look at his face and lowers himself to sit beside him. “You need to talk to me,” he says softly, echoing his own words from just a few days before. Kurt snorts and turns the corners of his mouth up. 

“I was thinking about the future,” he says, and Blaine looks pained.

“You need to leave,” he says. It sounds neutral, the way he says it, but Kurt’s certain it’s more resigned. 

“Not you,” he stresses. “I don’t want to leave you. I never want to leave you. But I think we both know I’m not made for the life you lead.”

Blaine is silent and almost unnaturally still, and then he says, his voice almost lost in the noise of the harbour, “I can’t do this forever either.” 

It’s the first time he’s said any such thing to Kurt, and Kurt doesn’t know what to say. When Blaine looks at him, he looks determined, resolute. He says, “I’ve told you before, I don’t need to call a place home. I’ll be at home wherever you are, and I know in my heart that that’s true. And I can’t do this forever. Unless we’re lucky, we’ll be dead before we’re thirty and I guess - there was a time when that wouldn’t have scared me. But it does now. I don’t - I have something now worth staying alive for.” 

Kurt sets his mouth in a firm line, stares at Blaine and tries to work out what the right answer is. He believes that the words are the truth of Blaine’s heart, but it’s still a lot to ask of him. He doesn’t have the right answers, but he can let Blaine make his own decisions. 

“So what do we do, Captain?” he asks, and Blaine laughs. It huffs out of him like he was holding his breath, warm and forceful. 

“I guess, first thing’s first, we need to find you four walls and a roof.”

Kurt would be the first to admit that he’s not an expert, but he thinks he may have a solution to that particular dilemma. 

“How about you take me home,” he says. “I believe I’m in possession of a good size plantation in Jamaica, and I suspect it could be perfect for all of us.”

Blaine doesn’t speak at all, but when he gets to his feet, there’s a bounce to his step that has been missing all week. 

Kurt can only hope that they’re making the right decision.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Klaine Summer Challenge 2016, prompt: Outdoor Concert (or, y’know, a passing mention of a military tattoo type thing? ONWARDS!)
> 
>  **Research** , what research? I looked up when Port Royal moved to Kingston (earlier than you’d think), but then gave up trying to work out how a known pirate ship would make it into the harbour uninterrupted. Deus ex, blah blah. And then I distracted myself with 18th century women’s clothing. Why not?
> 
>  **Apologies** because I had such a great plan to get these done on time, and then my brain fell out. 

Once they have moved all of Kurt’s belongings back aboard the ‘Princess’, Blaine asks Santana if they can talk, ideally in private. She looks at him for a long, silent minute, and then jerks her head up and down, gestures for him to follow her. She leads him into her cabin, where she locks the door and gestures for him to sit, lowering herself into her chair behind the desk. Blaine does as he’s bid, perches on the edge of the seat and clasps his hands together between his knees. Santana’s hair is free around her shoulders, and her shirt is open down her chest. Even with her exterior softened and loose, though, the intensity of her stare is unabated. 

“Speak to me, _mahal_ ,” she says, and Blaine’s exhale is shaky. He studies the edge of her desk, the piles of maps and books, and he scrubs his hands over his face. When he finally meets her eyes, he knows that she already knows what he has to say. It makes his next breath easier, clearing the lump in his throat and the tightness gathering in his chest. 

“When Kurt leaves,” he says, “I would like your permission to go with him.”

Santana doesn’t respond. Her face doesn’t change. Blaine watches the rise and fall of her chest and lets the silence linger long between them. Part of him wants to fill the silence with words, with explanations - he’s never wanted to die out here alone, and he’s been honest with her as long as he’s known her that he wants to love _someone._ He’s given himself to a lot of wrong someones over the years, afterall. She’s held him against her and whispered their truths into his hair and promised him that there’s someone in the vast who’ll let him love them with everything he has, and now he has - 

Blaine doesn’t actually realise he’s crying again until Santana hauls herself from her chair, rounds the desk, and presses a cloth into his hands. She pulls him against her and Blaine wraps an arm around his hips, presses his face to the soft fabric of her sash and breathes in the familiar, comforting smell of her body and the oils she rubs into her skin. 

“Did you think I’d stop you?” she asks him when the shaking of his shoulders eases, and Blaine shrugs awkwardly, sniffs and tries for a laugh that comes out wet and strangled. 

“No,” he says, and then, more honestly. “I thought maybe? Like when Sebastian-” 

Santana makes a disparaging noise that makes Blaine look up at her face. 

“If he was like Sebastian, I wouldn’t let you go.” 

Blaine opens his mouth to argue that Sebastian hadn’t been _so_ bad when her words hit hard in his chest.

 _I wouldn’t let you go._

He rises from the chair and wraps his arms around her in a crushing bear hug, and Santana is so surprised that her arms curl around him in return. 

 

Actual plans are slower to materialise. There’s a lot of all four of them cocooning themselves in Santana’s cabin as they pour over what maps they have. Occasionally one of them will leave to fetch food or water, but mostly they make plans for how they will return Kurt (and, after much arguing and a lot of shouting, Brittany) to their lives. Santana strokes Brittany’s hair and presses kisses to her eyebrows and her nose and tells her that they need a cover. She needs to go back to her life.

“It’s only temporary, mi cielo,” she says, “Until I can come for you. I need you to be safe.”

Brittany, always more clever than her London set had allowed, nods her head eventually, says, “Would you be able to use the estate for storage?”

“I'm already storing you there,” Santana smiles. She has a special smile for Brittany, one that makes her eyes shine and her usually hard face softer. It's a smile that feels hard earned and not easily betrayed, and it makes Kurt understand how Santana has been Blaine's world for so long. 

“Seriously,” Brittany presses, seemingly oblivious. “I seem to recall there was a lot of land. If it's accessible, we could consider making Newside a drop point? I know nothing about sugar, but I've learned a little about the trade value of plundered spices. And you'd be safer with somewhere to go.”

Santana looks at Brittany for a moment as if she's never seen her before. Slowly, she nods her head. Blaine can see she's thinking, and he glances at Kurt. Kurt also appears to be mulling the prospect over, though he looks less surprised that Brittany handed it to them. It is, though, Santana who breaks the silence. 

“We need to get you to Newside first,” she declares, and then, her tone clear that it’s a dismissal, “Blaine, I need your help with the route.”

It's not entirely true, Blaine knows. She needs Kurt and Brittany to spend time together, to become comfortable with one another again. They need to convince Jamaica’s gentry that they are who they say, that they are married and have been lucky to survive their ordeal at sea. 

It curls hot and jealous beneath Blaine's skin when he thinks about how that may mean she has to share the spaces in Kurt's life that have been reserved for him now. He shifts uncomfortably when the cabin door closes behind them, and misses the way Santana's gaze follows Brittany's retreating form as well.

 

Their last days aboard the ‘Princess’ go almost too quickly. As the nights wane into hours, Blaine’s presence becomes almost constant. He sits cross legged on Kurt’s bed, his stockinged toes tucked beneath his thighs as he watches Kurt work and pack. His hand finds Kurt’s beneath the table in the galley, tangling their fingers together as they eat. When he’s not required on deck, he finds time to glut himself on what parts of Kurt’s body he can get to. In the quiet after, Kurt promises him that this isn’t goodbye, and traces the scars on his back with his fingers until Blaine sinks into the side of his body and sleeps.

It’s just growing light when Santana knocks on the door of Kurt’s cabin to rouse them. She’s dressed in full skirts, her waist pulled tiny by her corset, her face showing signs of her discomfort as she stands in front of them. She instructs Blaine to put on the best clothes he owns, and that they will be leaving as soon as they’re all ready. 

Once they’re on deck, she explains that they’re going to take the ‘Princess’ into Kingston harbour and head directly for the Governor’s office. Santana will have one of her men act as a mercenary, and they will attempt to claim the bounty for returning them alive and unharmed. Once they are safe, Santana and her men will leave for the cove they’ve marked on the map, and she and Blaine will come back ashore and meet them at the estate house, see them settled in and assess whether or not they can use it in future, and how long it will be before Blaine can stay. 

No one asks what they do if the plan fails, if Blaine or Santana is recognised or arrested. Kurt only holds Blaine’s hand tightly in his own and offers a prayer to the heavens for any luck he has left.

 

Against all odds, the plan is successful. They dock in Kingston in the middle of a military display, and the harbourmaster turns a blind eye to the identity of the ‘Princess’ in exchange for silver. 

Kurt and Brittany are transported from Kingston to Newside by carriage, and word is sent back to England that they have been recaptured safely, albeit with neither luggage nor ready funds. They are able, however, to verify their identities and confirm that no harm has come to them whilst they were captured, that the good woman and her husband who have returned them have treated them with nothing but dignity and courtesy. 

Once they are safe, Santana takes her payment and leaves, giving Blaine little more than enough time to grip Kurt’s hand one more time and pull him into a rapid hug. She doesn’t let herself touch Brittany at all. Kurt and Brittany are transported by coach to their estate. 

For a time, they sit in the coach in silence, both of them lost in their own thoughts. They bump and rumble along, staring at the carriage walls right above one another’s shoulders. There’s nothing that either of them can think to say. Everything has changed for them in the time they’ve been missing, and Kurt understands that he has no desire to lie to her forever, or to expect her to be complicit in that deceit. He sighs heavily, and Brittany nods and smiles.

She doesn’t speak until they alight at the doors of the estate house, though. They barely speak as they sit down in their too large dining room to eat, and they barely speak as they climb the winding staircase to the second floor. The few staff they have on retainer direct them to their separate rooms, a girl trailing after Brittany to unlace her and unpin her hair.

It’s only when the house is quiet that she tiptoes back along the dark corridors and knocks on Kurt’s door. Despite how sick the motion of the sea had made him, the silence of the house and the size of his bed make him equally uncomfortable. He’s become used to the weight of Blaine asleep beside him, and the cramped quarters aboard the ‘Princess’. He’s not asleep, and he calls for her to enter.

Even lying side by side in the vast expanse of Kurt’s bed, though, they can’t say the words they need to say. They seem stuck inside of them, oppressive and heavy. Instead, Brittany grips Kurt’s hand beneath the covers, and rolls over to curl against his body. She feels wrong, and she smells wrong, but falling asleep with the weight of her beside him is easier than having nothing there at all.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Klaine Summer Challenge, prompt: camping
> 
> **Research** , because this amuses me - I looked up women’s make up in the 18th century (I wanted to look up lip colour), and somewhere down that rabbit hole, I realised I was [here](http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/leisure/sanitation.html). That’s a UMich page. IDK about you, but I’m amused. In other news, I looked up the minimum time it would take to travel between Nassau and Kingston in a sailboat (best guess, allowing for dead time and sleep, about a week, _maybe_ ), and I desperately wanted to shoehorn in [this titbit](http://vampireisabitstrong.tumblr.com/post/149454684541/snubbingapollo-schemingminor), because I love it dearly. That might actually be the most research I’ve done. Look, ma. I provided _links_.

Santana makes one detour before she rejoins Blaine and her crew aboard the ‘Princess’. She stops at an inn, and tells Blaine to carry on ahead of her. He looks at her dubiously, indicates her dress and her coat, and asks her if she’s certain. She slips a small silver knife from her bodice and smiles, and Blaine manages to flick the corner of his mouth into a smile.

“I’m certain,” she says. “This is private business. Make the ship ready to sail as soon as I return.”

Blaine nods and backs away, and doesn’t take his eyes from her until the dark of the inn’s interior swallows her whole. He knows she’ll be fine, but- 

He bumps into the arm of a man two times his size, who grumbles and grabs at his shoulder and misses. Blaine balks and turns, and then ducks out of reach of the fist that swings at him. 

“I’m sorry,” he apologises again, and he darts away, back towards the relative safety of the ‘Princess’. The crew is waiting, and he passes on Santana’s orders, tells them they’re heading back out almost immediately, and he’s up in the rigging himself when Santana finally does return. She doesn’t stop moving as she crosses the deck, and is still wearing her skirts when she orders the ‘Princess’ out, that they’re to set course for Nassau and not around the coast as Blaine had thought they were heading. 

He shins down to the deck as quickly as he can, approaches her and asks her quietly what they’re doing. They had a plan, he he says, and she shakes her head and says nothing other than that they have no further business in Jamaica but that she has items she needs to collect in Nassau. If the passage goes well, they can be back in a few weeks. Twenty-one days, she tells him. That’s all she wants, and that’s it. Forever. 

“You promise?” he asks, his voice defeated and his face falling, and it twists in her chest that he even has to ask. She ignores the feeling, though, reaching behind her head to remove the pins from her hair, combing it through with her fingers as it falls loose around her face. She knows that he will thank her when she has what she wants.

“I promise,” she replies, and presses a scarlet kiss to his cheek and the amaryllis from her hair into his hands before she disappears from the deck to change.

 

They make good time across the water, though the days feel long to Blaine. Each movement feels hard and mechanical, and he eats sparsely and sleeps heavily. For her part, Santana tries to keep him occupied, but when they do dock in Nassau, she has to pull him from the ship by force. He stands just behind her as she pays the harbourmaster. 

She leads him through the crowds to a tavern, above the door of which is a sign depicting a white mermaid on a blue background, faded in the bright sunshine. Blaine doesn’t look at it, but Santana stops to stare for a moment. She doesn’t know why, but something in the faded image makes her think of Brittany. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. For Santana, faith is hard to come by, but she hopes desperately that her request has been passed on, and that Mike Chang and his wife Tina come through with the goods she needs. 

Blaine pauses in the doorway and looks back at her, confusion bright in his eyes. She shakes herself and follows him as he pushes through the door and into the gloomy interior. He doesn’t say much as she scans the patrons, but he does protest the mug of ale she buys him and the room she books them for the night. 

“We have to wait,” she says. “The man I need to see isn’t here.”

Blaine stares at the mug for a long minute, and then at her. “You promised me,” he says. “Twenty one days.”

“And I’m trying my hardest to keep that schedule. But what I need isn’t here, and I can’t leave without it.” 

Blaine’s shoulders sag and he downs the ale in his mug before pushing himself to his feet again. “I’m going upstairs,” he says, and doesn’t wait for a response before he weaves through the tables and takes the steps two at a time, disappearing from her view entirely as he slips through the door at the top.

 

It takes two days for Mike Chang to make his way into Nassau. When Santana sees his sails, she makes her way down to the waterfront and is ready to board as soon as she is able. She crosses the deck quickly, brushing past his men, and raps sharply on the cabin door. There is movement inside, and the sound of the lock turning. The door cracks open a little, enough for Santana to see two bright eyes staring at her. 

“Open the door, Tina,” Santana barks, and Tina jumps a little but swings the door open regardless. Behind her, in the dim light of the cabin, a second woman sits on the bed. She’s older than they are, though not old, and her dark hair is carefully curled and pinned behind her head. She looks up when Santana enters, and her mouth curls up into a smile of dim recognition. Tina takes a step back, and then another, and then plops down on the bed beside her. The older woman takes Tina’s hand and squeezes it reassuringly.

“Don’t worry,” the woman says. “She’s not going to hurt me. I believe she knows my son.” 

Her voice is rich and confident, and her smile doesn’t shift at all as she stares at Santana. For her part, Santana can’t help noticing the firm shape of the woman’s body, encased as it is in worn silk that was probably rich once. She looks strong and enticing, and - if she wasn’t Blaine’s mom - Santana would be tempted to try her luck.

She doesn’t have time to think about it, though, before two arms wrap around her body and pull her back out of the cabin. She shrieks and kicks, and a breath huffs past her ear. She drops back to the deck and whirls around to find the long, lanky figure of Mike Chang standing in front of her. His grin is wide and easy, and she finds herself smiling back at him.

“How much?” she asks. “For her, and for the other things I asked for?”

Mike Chang names his price, and Santana has left with the booty she came for before Blaine has even roused himself from sleep.

 

It takes six days to make the return trip from Nassau, and for two of them, Blaine doesn’t speak a word to Santana or to his mother. When he does finally speak, he asks Santana exactly what she’s doing.

“I thought you’d like for her to be here,” she says, and her tone suggests it should be obvious. 

Blaine doesn’t speak for a long moment, and then says, “Be here for what?”

“She put you on the ships to keep you safe,” Santana says, and Blaine snorts, rubs his hand over his shoulder, curling his fingers down his back. 

“That worked well,” he says, and knows he sounds bitter.

“She still did it to keep you from the men in the port,” Santana argues. “And I think you’ll both appreciate it when she’s there to see you and Kurt - when she sees that the choice she made was the right one for you, in the long term.”

Blaine lowers his gaze to the deck, and Santana grips his arm, her hands strong enough to bruise. The pressure grounds him a little, and he breathes out slowly, nods once. When he looks back up, there are tears in his eyes.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and she nods her acceptance of his apology. 

The remaining time aboard the ‘Princess’ passes more quickly. Blaine and his mother spend the time together, and he shows her how to navigate as they catch up. He doesn’t mean for her to see the scars on his skin, to learn that her decisions didn’t save him as she’d hoped, but it happens all the same. There are tears on her face when it happens, and he wants to tell her that it’s in the past now, that it doesn’t matter. That he’s been with more men who treated him right than he has men who left him bloody. He tries to say it, but her tears choke him as well. 

“I’m still alive, Mama,” he says, and leans against her as she strokes his hair. “I’m alive, and soon you’ll meet the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

His mother doesn’t speak, only presses her lips to his tan skin and leaves them there. When he does hear her voice, it is whispering the same quiet prayers for him that he’s heard so many times before. From her lips, though, he doesn’t feel the same throb of fear that he’s come to expect. 

 

As they come back upon Jamaica, Blaine makes the plans to navigate them around the coast the cove they first identified when they were going to take Kurt and Brittany back to the estate themselves. Although that hadn’t worked out, the plan turns out to be good. They anchor off of the coast, and Blaine rows the three of them across the water to the cove. He and Santana drag the rowboat up the beach whilst Pam wades into the shallows, and then - by flickering candlelight - they try to decide which way is the best way to go to find the estate house.

It’s been almost seventeen days since Blaine promised Kurt he would come back for him, and each one feels like a lead weight holding him back. 

Finally, though, they settle on a direction. Santana pushes ahead of him, and Blaine stays back with his mother, holding her as they push through the trees in the general direction of where they hope Newside is. The walk is long, and they sleep under the stars before carrying on with the early morning light. 

Just as Blaine is beginning to wonder if Brittany’s directions had been wrong, the dense jungle opens out into tilled land. Blaine has never been so relieved.

 

For his own part, Kurt spends those seventeen days waiting for a sign that Blaine is coming. He spends seventeen days buried behind stacks of paperwork, locked behind doors. He spends seventeen days counting each hour, because he believes in his heart that Blaine is coming. He doesn’t know when, and he doesn’t know how, but he knows without a doubt that Blaine will appear one day and it will be as if these days in between had never happened. He spends seventeen days learning about the quality of his land, about the general geography of it. About water access and how much it costs to run, and each day is tedious but it stops him from thinking that each day is a long, lonely slog from the day he was left in Kingston by the man he wants to spend the rest of his days with.

Of course, he also spends that time with Brittany. She sits with the estate accounts, and talks with him as she fills in the figures. She makes quiet comments on them, and crosses through wrong calculations with neat little lines, and then looks up at him on the fourteenth day and declares that the estate does reasonably well. He and Blaine should easily be comfortable here.

“And you?” he asks, and a small smile spreads across her face.

“Not me,” she says, and rests her chin on her hands, stares dreamily at nothing. “There’s a whole world out there, Kurt. And nothing stands between me and it but imagination and possibility. I can’t stay here.” 

Kurt nods his head, and thinks about the things he’s seen, the world that opened up in front of him so many weeks ago. A year ago, he had imagined that this would be his life - one of quiet, unspoken misery, both of them trapped by politeness and society. It’s not that he doesn’t love his wife; he does, deeply. But he’s not in love with her, and there’s a difference he understands now, indelible on his heart.

“I won’t stop you,” he answers, and she laughs a little, merry and infectious.

“How do you picture the future, Kurt?” she asks, and he blinks slowly.

“I haven’t really. Blaine and I, maybe a dog. When I was a boy, I pictured children, but I don’t suppose that’s likely now.” 

“There’s no reason you can’t,” she says. “We’re married, after all.” 

Kurt laughs at that, his cheeks going pink. “Maybe,” he says. “One day.” 

The conversation drops at that, and they’re silent through dinner. It’s only later, when the house is quiet and Brittany sneaks into his room again that he says, so quiet that the words are almost lost in the darkness, “Could you do that? Have a baby that you’d leave for me - us to raise?”

Brittany doesn’t even open her eyes, but she hums a yes that weaves itself into Kurt’s body and doesn’t fade.

 

It’s mid-morning on the eighteenth day that Blaine appears on the front lawns. He strides across them with purpose, twirling something between his fingers, and behind him comes Santana, who has her head bent towards that of another woman wearing loose skirts and no shoes. Kurt catches sight of them out of the window as he passes, and he yells for Brittany at almost exactly the moment he pulls open the doors and hurls himself down the steps.

When Blaine catches sight of him as well, he breaks into a run of his own, crossing the lawns quickly and wrapping Kurt in a hug that’s almost bone crushing in its intensity. His hands tangle desperately in Kurt’s coat, and he buries his face in Kurt’s neck, and when he does finally pull away, Kurt can see that there are tears not just in his eyes but on his cheeks as well.

When he’s calmed down enough to speak, and when Santana and the woman she is with have caught them up, Blaine introduces Kurt to his mother. Kurt shakes her hand and wonders why she is here, and then Blaine produces a gaudy gold ring from his sash, breathes out slowly as he takes Kurt’s hand and slides it onto a finger.

“So there’s this thing,” he says, soft so only Kurt can hear, for all that Kurt isn’t really listening at all. “And I don’t - it doesn’t really apply, because you’re not - and we’re not - the boat.” He waves vaguely, and he knows in his heart that he isn’t making sense. He takes a deep breath and tries again. “There’s a tradition, amongst pirates, where we swear our lives and half of all we have to our closest friend. To our lovers. Santana can perform the ceremony, if you - Do you want? I don’t-” 

Kurt doesn’t have the words to answer, only clutches the gaudy ring on his hand to his chest and nods his head, and he feels the world settle right around him as he’s enveloped in the arms of all the people in it that matter the most to him.

 

_And later…_

Brittany is running the ‘Princess’ on the now familiar route between Jamaica and Nassau. She climbs the rigging like she was born to it, and swears and burps with the crew in the mess. They laugh with her, and they listen to her, and they know that when she speaks, it’s with Santana’s voice. 

In Nassau, she brings a fat cat aboard the ship. She says it reminds her of her old tom that she left so long ago. She names her Lady Tubbington, and says she’ll catch the rats that are a constant menace. The cat barely moves from her cabin, though, and they laugh about it.

Back in Jamaica, Brittany rows the small boat across the water herself, and makes the familiar two day journey to the estate house alone. Halfway between, just as they make it onto her land, Kurt and Blaine have erected a semi-permanent base as protection from the elements. She knows she’s almost home when she reaches it.

As she crosses the lawns, the doors to the estate house open and a small child with blonde curls races across the lawn and into her arms, and in the door behind her appears Santana, heavily pregnant and smiling. Brittany gathers her daughter to her, and walks the rest of the way with a smile on her face and the sunshine in her hair.


End file.
